


Catalysis

by follow_the_sun



Series: Shrinkyclinks Hijinks [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Ableism, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Avenger Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes' Coffee Addiction, Complete, De-Serumed Steve Rogers, Deaf Clint Barton, Depression, Hospitals, I Promise This is Not as Dark as the Tags Make It Sound, M/M, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sam Wilson Is a Good Bro, Sassy Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers: Aggressive Chihuahua, Suicidal Thoughts (mentioned)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-05-20 15:50:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6015049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ex-soldier Bucky Barnes doesn't have time to think about that skinny blonde guy he met in the hospital. Especially not after the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. shows up on his doorstep and asks him to save the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Bucky is reading when the nurse wheels the new guy in, and he mutters a curse under his breath. Looks like he’s getting a new roommate. He shouldn’t be surprised; it’s been 36 hours since the last occupant of the bed across from his (72, coronary bypass, called Bucky “son” and the nurses “sweetie”) was released, and he knew he wouldn’t have the room to himself for long. He was hoping for at least one more night, though. It’s hard enough to get any sleep in this place, harder when he’s consciously trying to be quiet so nobody will know he’s awake, which seems like it magnifies every sound up to and including his own breathing.

At least the kid looks too sick to be chatty, Bucky thinks, and then reproaches himself for being like that. Especially since, on a second glance, the new guy looks like death on a cracker. Bucky assesses him at 5’5” and a hundred pounds at a generous estimate, and he’s never seen anybody whose skin he’d actually describe as _gray_ before. Gina, the nurse, doesn’t even brace herself before she says, “Okay, Steve, up we go,” and practically dead-lifts him from the chair to the bed.

“Thanks,” New Guy Steve mutters, in about the least appreciative voice Bucky has ever heard. If this guy gives Gina lip, Bucky will smack him, sickly or not. But then he starts coughing, and Gina sits him up, fits an oxygen cannula onto him, and starts rubbing her hand in circles over his back. Bucky pretends to go back to his book while she helps Steve ride out the coughing fit, but there’s really no ignoring the fact that the poor bastard is hacking up a lung over there. When he’s done, Gina pours him a glass of water and gives him the nurse-call button, and Steve falls back against the propped-up bed, out like a light almost before Gina turns away.

“Hey, Gina?” Bucky calls, softly, as she’s moving toward the door.

Gina heads over to his bed, putting on a smile in spite of the fact that she has to be dog tired. Gina’s good people, and when he gets out of here, he owes her a fruit basket or something. “What’s up, Sarge? I hope the IV isn’t acting up again.”

“Nah, I’m fine, but could you pull the curtain a sec?”

She does, and then she sits down, which is probably against the rules, but hell, she’s been on her feet all day and he’s not going to tell on her. “So, new guy,” he says, pitching his voice low and quiet. “What’s his deal?”

“Pneumonia. But don’t worry, we wouldn’t have him in here if he was contagious. They’re running out of beds upstairs, and he’s on enough antibiotics to kill a horse.”

“Jesus. I had pneumonia once, but I don’t remember it being that bad.”

“You didn’t have it on top of asthma and a heart condition. Steve, there, has a frequent flier card in the ER. It’s a vicious cycle I see a lot—can’t cover his hospital bills, skips his meds to save money, can’t stay out of the hospital without them, racks up more bills, repeat.”

“That sucks,” Bucky says, and then he stops. Goddammit, he doesn’t have the spare emotional energy to sympathize with a random stranger. He’s only got a couple more days in here, and then he’ll never see the guy again. “Could you give me a hand up? I need to hit the head.”

He’s been through it enough times that this shouldn’t bother him anymore, but Bucky’s been trained to be self-sufficient, and asking for help never gets any less humiliating. At least Clint brought him some sweatpants, so he doesn’t have to do this with his ass hanging out. Gina helps him move the pole with the morphine drip so he can concentrate on not falling off the crutches, which would be tricky enough if his prosthetic hadn’t been acting up ever since the crash—and it’s going to keep doing it until he can get over to the VA center in Manhattan and have it fixed. Thank God he heals fast.

He steals a look at the new guy as he passes him on the way back to his own bed. The initial assessment holds up: skinny young guy with dirty-blonde hair, somehow fever-flushed and deathly pale at the same time. Dark circles under closed eyes and a little scar high up on one cheek. Eyelashes that more than one woman of his acquaintance would probably kill for.

_Jesus, Buck, where’d that come from? The guy’s not even your type._

He wonders what color Steve’s eyes are, when they’re open.

 

Bright fucking blue is what Steve’s eyes are in the morning light, which completely ruins Bucky’s already nearly inedible hospital breakfast. He’s pushing the gooey egg-powder mess aside and reaching for his book again when Steve says, “I hope I didn’t wake you last night.”

Bucky looks up. His eyes meet Steve’s, and his stomach does a flip that makes him almost glad breakfast was so gross. “Huh?” he says, because that’s the kind of super-intelligent dialogue that comes out of his mouth before coffee.

“With the coughing. I know it’s pretty revolting.” Steve clears his throat. “Sorry.”

“No worries. My sister’s got asthma, so I know the deal.” Too late, he realizes he shouldn’t have said that; it might get Gina in trouble if Steve puts it together that she violated confidentiality. “I’m Bucky.”

“Bucky?”

“’S’a nickname.”

“No, I thought it was on your birth certificate.”

Steve’s got a wry tone that warms Bucky’s heart instantly. “Well, that thing says I’m James Buchanan Barnes, but my dad had already locked down James, Jimmy, and Jim. Buchanan’s after my ma’s family, so, Bucky for short.”

“Got something against Jamie?”

“You got a problem with my name, punk?”

Steve’s expression goes blank, and Bucky realizes his mistake. Clean-cut little guy like him looks over at a long-haired, muscled-up freak with a metal arm and—doesn’t look intimidated. Instead, to Bucky’s surprise, he goes on the defensive, pushing himself up and glaring. “You give everybody a hard time when they’re just trying to make conversation?”

“Jesus, kid, calm your tits. I was just messing around.” Bucky gives him the warmest smile he can manage. Poor guy doesn’t look any better at all after a shitty night’s sleep, and in the cold light of morning, Bucky can see the kinds of lines on his thin face that only come from chronic pain. No wonder he’s feeling combative. Or that could just be because they won’t bring you any coffee in this joint. There’s some swill that they _call_ coffee, sure, but Bucky isn’t buying that it’s anything but watered-down motor oil.

“Yeah. Sorry.” Steve flops, and Bucky hears him mutter, “Gosh bless it, I hate hospitals.” It’s all Bucky can do not to laugh even before Steve adds, “And don’t call me kid. I’m older than you.”

“I’ll take that bet. How old are you?”

Steve hesitates. “Twenty-seven.”

“Ha! I’m twenty-eight. Kid.”

“Jerk.”

“Accurate. What do you do, Steve?”

“I’m an ar…” Steve breaks off into a coughing fit. Bucky waits, although his fingers are itching to press the nurse-call button. He knows a little about not wanting help all the time. “I’m a graphic designer. Well, was. Pretty sure I’ve lost my last couple clients now, blew all my deadlines being in here.”

“You were gonna say something else,” Bucky says. If anybody asked him what he’s doing right now, he’d probably claim that he’s only bothering to make conversation because he’s bored, and that it has nothing to do with those eyes or those eyelashes. “You were gonna say artist, weren’t you?”

“I went to art school.” Steve sighs, or maybe he’s just struggling for breath. “Don’t have much time to work on my own stuff, though. Gotta keep hustling for clients, and when I do, they want the same boring, recycled work everybody else does. Shoulda got a real job, I guess.”

“Hey, bad luck can find you anywhere,” Bucky says, and since when is he so chatty? “I joined the army ’cause it was supposed to be a great career move, and all I got was blown up for my troubles.”

“You were in the army? Is that how…” Steve starts to motion and then, Bucky supposes, probably realizes it’s rude to point at a prosthetic arm and just winds up doing an awkward wave. “Is that why you’re here?”

“Nah, I’ve been out for almost two years. The new stuff is from crashing my bike.”

“Are you a bike messenger or something?”

“My motorcycle,” Bucky clarifies. _Bike messenger. Jesus._ “You can ask if you want.”

“Ask what?”

“About the arm. Everybody does.” He waits, then sighs, because Steve clearly isn’t going to ask and now it’s weird. “I was stationed in Afghanistan. My unit had orders to escort this rich asshole to a weapons test way out in the middle of nowhere. Went fine, we got in the Humvees to go home, and the whole convoy got blown up. I was a POW for a while, and my arm got infected while they were keeping me in a cave. By the time I got traded back, it was a lost cause, and they had to amputate. Then I lucked into this program that got me a really cool experimental prosthetic. I was gonna get deployed with my old unit again—that was all I wanted, to get back out there and go back to _normal_ —and then Stark Industries pitched them an arm that was two-thirds of the cost and that was the end of the Winter Soldier project. I can fire a gun as well as I ever could, maybe better, but the Army decided that since I wasn’t testing tech they wanted to use anymore, keeping me in the field was on the wrong side of their cost-benefit analysis. So I came home, got a job, it was fine—I mean, I kind of hate it, but I’m good at keeping my head down and following orders—and then, guess what? I went out for a drive, hit a slick spot on the road, crashed my motorcycle, and managed to bust my leg in no less than three places.”

Bucky hadn’t meant to talk that much. He looks down, while Steve sits there in a moment of what he assumes is stunned silence. Then Steve says, “This is one of those things where I’m supposed to realize how good my life is and be thankful for it, right?”

“Hell, no, pal. You’re supposed to realize that no matter how bad you got it with your lungs or heart or whatever, you don’t get bragging rights over me, okay?”

Bucky’s always been good at reading people, and he figured something like that would go over better with Steve than anything remotely resembling empathy or pity. He was right. Steve finally cracks a smile, and Bucky’s heart absolutely does not stop for a few seconds. “Hey, Bucky,” he says, “you don’t want my breakfast, do you? I haven’t, uh, breathed on it or anything.”

“Are you kidding? This is swill. But I’ll take the Jello, if you can toss it over here.” Jello and pudding cups are pretty much Bucky’s only survival strategy on days when Clint can’t stop by to bring him real food.

“Can I toss it over there,” Steve mutters, and lobs it in an arc that ends dead center between their two beds. The plastic cup breaks, and green Jello spatters the floor in a radius two feet wide.

Steve’s laughed himself into another coughing fit, and Bucky is just plain laughing, when Robert the Asshole Orderly comes in to help him get dressed for his morning PT appointment. Bucky has enough of a problem with authority already that when Robert says, “Come on, Barnes, stop screwing around, this is a _hospital,”_ it just makes him laugh that much harder.

He’s fifteen minutes into his appointment before he realizes he completely forgot to self-administer his morning dose of morphine, the one that, up till now, he’s barely been able to hold out for until after breakfast. The physical therapist notes this in his records as a sign of major progress, but Bucky is pretty sure it’s just a sign of major distraction.

 _Steve,_ he thinks, and then, _Oh, fuck, Barnes, what are you getting yourself into?_

Clint is there when Terrance, a very friendly non-asshole orderly, brings him back to the room, and Bucky’s heart lifts a little. PT is hell, and thanks to his mistiming the meds this morning, he has half an hour before he can give himself the morphine he usually gets right after the session. But Clint’s brought Starbucks for both of them, and to Bucky’s surprise, he’s sitting in the chair by Steve’s bed. Bucky’s joy comes to an abrupt end when he hears which story Clint is telling: “—and then he says, ‘Bro, you an asshole, bro,’ and Bucky—hey, Bucky, I’m telling Steve here about the Tracksuit Mafia.”

“What can I bribe you with to _not_ tell that story?” Bucky asks, settling himself back into his bed.

“Whatever it is, I’ll double it,” says Steve, which is pretty big talk for someone who may or may not have a job to go back to.

“It’s my genuine pleasure, Steve. So the jerk in the tracksuit says that and Bucky here, he says something back to the guy in Russian, he still won’t tell me what it was—”

“It’s not suitable for your delicate ears, Barton. My grandparents were Russian,” he explains to Steve. “I learned some stuff.”

“—anyway, the guy punches Bucky in the nose, Bucky swings back just as the cops show up, and _that’s_ the story of how the NYPD got a mug shot of Bucky wearing a blood-covered Doctor Who T-shirt.”

“No charges were filed,” Bucky says. “And at least I was _wearing_ a shirt. Hey, Clint, look over here.”

Clint turns. He’s got his hearing aids in, obviously, but Bucky signs, _Don’t make me look bad in front of Steve._

Clint grins. _You have a crush?_ he signs back.

 _Asshole,_ he signs, and then, _Maybe._

“You guys know sign language?” Steve says.

“Yeah, Clint’s not just any old asshole, he’s a Deaf asshole.”

“You better watch that kind of talk if you want me to keep bringing you Starbucks, pal,” Clint says, and Bucky shoots back a sign that isn’t ASL before taking a long drink of his white mocha. Damn, that’s a 300% improvement in his quality of life.

“You got anything going on today?” he asks. He has no idea what Clint’s real job is beyond his part-time gig as building super, but it involves weird hours and random disappearances—part of Bucky’s deal to get an apartment in his building involved his agreeing to take Clint’s dog at any time, day or night.

“I’m on call, but I’m free as long as they don’t call me.”

“I’ll give you everything in my wallet if you go get us some real food.”

“‘Everything in your wallet’ is a picture of your sister’s kids and an expired condom. I’ll go out of the goodness of my heart, though.” Bucky snorts, and Clint turns to Steve. “So what do you like?”

“I don’t want anything, I’m not really hungry.”

Yeah, that’s bullshit. Bucky saw Steve’s face light up and then fall again when it occurred to him that he might get asked to pay for this. “Clint, get us like six cheeseburgers and fries and put it all on my tab. If we have food left, you can take it home for Lucky.” Jesus, why is Bucky so intent on seeing Steve put some food in his face? _Get lost,_ he signs, and Clint grins and takes off.

Steve ends up eating two of the burgers, at a rate that suggests this is his first good meal in a long time, and Bucky goes to his afternoon x-rays (since the metal arm put MRIs permanently out of the question) with the satisfaction of a job well done.

 

By the middle of the second day, Bucky is keeping a list in his head of the things he and Steve have in common:

  * They both grew up in Red Hook, only a few streets apart—in fact, it’s a little surprising they haven’t run into each other before now. Then again, Steve says he was in poor enough health as a kid that he was mostly homeschooled, so that probably accounts for it.
  * They’re both absolutely crazy about old jazz and swing music. Only Bucky has ever tried dancing to it, but Steve’s breadth and scope of knowledge are incredibly impressive.
  * They both prefer books to television, dogs to cats (although Steve’s violently allergic to cats and only mildly allergic to dogs, which probably affects his opinion), Star Wars to Star Trek, and chocolate to vanilla.
  * They’d both love to call themselves Gryffindors but figure they’d actually be Slytherins, if they’re honest about it.
  * They both hate bullies, whether they’re on the schoolyard or overseas.



That last one is also sort of why, on the third day, Steve loses his mind.

It’s not even a big thing: Bucky is trying to get ready for PT, and the metal arm is giving him trouble again, which means everything is going a little slower and taking a little longer. It’s not that he’s not trying to bend the elbow to slide it into the sleeve of his T-shirt, it’s that he _can’t._ So he doesn’t even pay attention to whatever it is that Robert says when he discovers that, once again, Bucky is going to delay his morning smoke break by a good ten minutes or so.

From the reaction, though, he has a pretty good idea what the word was.

“Hey, you wanna show some respect?” Steve says, surprisingly loudly, and Bucky turns his head and gapes at him. Steve’s eyes are _blazing._ He’s a hundred-ten pounds of white-hot rage in a hundred-pound body, and Robert starts and almost takes a step back before he remembers to be an asshole and says, “Ex _cuse_ me?”

“Son,” says Steve, which all by itself would be enough to crack Bucky up if his face wasn’t so deadly serious, “this man is a veteran who put his body and his life on the line serving this country. You have no right to use that kind of language.”

“Steve, it’s okay,” Bucky says, but that only seems to stoke the fire.

“It’s never okay, Bucky. Not for anybody, and especially not for somebody who works in a hospital.” Steve mashes the nurse-call button, and Gina, bless her, is the first one to poke her head in. “You got a patient advocate in this joint?” he asks.

“Sure. Problem?”

“Yeah, there’s a problem, all right. And Bucky needs someone else to take him to his session, because he’s not going anywhere with this creep.”

“This guy is crazy, Gina,” Robert begins, at the same time as Bucky says, “Steve, it’s fine, I don’t even care,” but Gina takes one look at Steve’s face and she knows there’s no going back. “Robert,” she says, “I think you’d better take your break now. I’ll help Mr. Barnes,” and by the time Bucky’s session is over, Robert the Asshole Orderly has been put on disciplinary probation and reassigned to another ward.

“They tell me I’ve got a little bit of a temper,” Steve says, by way of apology. “Sorry. If I made it worse for you, I mean. Not for him, ableist jerk.”

 **It’s your own fault,** Clint texts, in response to Bucky’s series of rapid-fire messages about the incident. **Feed a stray once and they never leave. I hope you enjoy being the proud owner of an aggressive Chihuahua.**

It doesn’t seem like that at all to Bucky, though. In fact, all he can think about is those stupid Regency romance movies his sister Becca used to watch on PBS, the ones where people were always dueling to the death over somebody’s honor. He never understood before how Becca could possibly find that kind of stupidity so attractive. He thinks maybe he finally knows what she was talking about.

And, great, now Bucky has a new and surprising reason to lie awake for half the night.

 

“How come nobody’s visited you yet?” Bucky asks, on the fourth day. Steve’s looking a hell of a lot better than he was, at least 15% of which Bucky attributes to the steady supply of actual food that Clint and Sam have been smuggling in under the guise of fattening Bucky up to his pre-accident weight. Bucky insists Steve’s doing him a favor by helping him eat it, and Steve’s more or less quit arguing with him about it. Case in point: now that he’s off the morphine drip and able to move himself around a lot better, Bucky has wheeled himself over by Steve’s bed so he can share the container of cookies Sam’s mom sent over.

Steve huffs a little laugh, which Bucky wishes he’d stop doing; it makes him cough. “Like who?”

“Like Martians, obviously. C’mon, I’m talking about your family and friends, you dork.”

“I don’t really have any of that.” By now, Bucky understands how the pattern works: a little accidental vulnerability followed by a lot of defensiveness. “Family was just me and my mom until she died, and as for friends… I guess it’s just hard for me to keep in touch with people.”

“You don’t have a girlfriend?”

Steve grins and ducks his head. “Well, I’m gay, so, no.”

Bucky hadn’t been sure until now, and he squelches the bubble of hope that rises up in his chest _so hard_ that it is _not funny_ before he says, “Boyfriend?”

“No boyfriend.”

“Stevie. You’re telling me you got nobody who cares that you’re in here? That’s no way to live.”

“Well, guys aren’t exactly lining up to date somebody they might step on, the way they are for you.”

“The hell are you talking about?”

“Uh, only Clint and Sam, who are both here _every day_ for you.”

“What? No. It’s not like that. I rent an apartment in a building Clint owns, and Sam’s an Army buddy, does counseling at the VA now. And they’re both straight. Which may be lucky for me, at least in Clint’s case. I love the guy, but his sex life is a tire fire.”

“So where’s your…”

“Significant other,” Bucky fills in. “I’m bi. And I’m between partners right now.” He glances sidelong at Steve and gives him the slow, lazy smile that’s probably his best move. “Why, you offering?”

“Fuck off, Barnes,” Steve says, with sudden sharpness.

Bucky doesn’t cringe, exactly, but he wants to. It’s not just that it’s the first time he’s ever heard Steve actually swear; it’s also that he’s out of practice at flirting, which means he’s also out of practice at rejection. He’s not about to let it show, though. Instead, he raises an eyebrow and says, “Language, pal.”

“Sorry.” Steve lets out a tense breath. “I’m sorry, Bucky. That was out of line. I just, uh. I… I know we’re not really friends or anything, but I really appreciate what you’ve been doing for me the last couple days.”

“What?” Bucky is startled, and not in a good way. “Are you kidding me? Of course we’re friends. And, look, I know it was a dick move, hitting on you when you’re sick, but it doesn’t have to be weird. I’ll even set you up with some nice guys I know, but I do want to us be friends, okay?”

 _I want to be friends. For fuck’s sake, Barnes, are you in second grade?_ his brain starts demanding, but then Steve blinks and says, “You were… serious about that?”

“About asking you out? Yeah, you think I’m so easy I just flirt with everybody who crosses my path?”

“Well, you kind of do,” says Steve, with a lopsided grin.

“Yeah, okay, fair. But that doesn’t mean I’m—” Bucky is saying, when Steve leans over and kisses him.

Things Bucky is not prepared for:

  * The way Steve’s teeth scrape clumsily over his lower lip.
  * Steve bringing his hand up behind his head, twining his fingers through Bucky’s too-long hair.
  * How blatantly, unapologetically _hungry_ Steve’s mouth feels on his.
  * The wave of heat that sweeps through his body like a fever, or maybe more like a forest fire.



When Steve pulls away—because Bucky sure as hell isn’t going to be the one to stop this—he’s panting like Lucky in August, and his hands, which are now pinning Bucky’s arms to the wheelchair, are clammy. Well, the left one, anyway; he can’t feel the texture of the right one on the metal arm, only a faint sense of pressure on the plates. Bucky hears himself make a little mewling sound. He’s not exactly a blushing virgin, but that immediate heat was something new. And he’s never believed that Disney movie crap about somehow sensing it when you meet The One, either—lust at first sight is a thing, sure, but loving somebody without knowing whether they drink coffee, or how much they tip at restaurants, or if they’re ever okay with ditching the big Saturday night plans in favor of just curling up in bed with you to watch a stupid old monster movie? Ridiculous.

But Steve.

_Steve._

He might learn to love Steve a little more quickly than he figured a person could, before today.

Then somebody turns the door handle, because fuck, fuck, _fuck,_ Bucky forgot he’s got his millionth stupid PT appointment scheduled for right now, and Steve is as far to the other side of the bed as he can get, wearing a completely unreadable expression, before the new orderly even has the door completely open. “We’re gonna talk about this,” Bucky tells Steve in a low voice, and then he spins the wheelchair around to face the music, hoping his face isn’t as red as he thinks it is.

His appointment gets delayed for inexplicable reasons, then delayed again, which is probably a blessing in disguise, because it takes forever for his heart rate to return to normal. (Not to mention the other thing that needs to settle down.) Spending the whole appointment bitching about his pain levels doesn’t get him out of a single exercise, though, and the therapist takes her goddamn _time_ writing up her notes before she springs him at the end of the session, so all told, he’s gone for a couple of hours before he’s free to head back to the room.

When he finally gets back, he finds out that Steve is gone.

 

“He checked himself out against medical advice,” Gina tells Bucky, “and that’s probably more than I’m allowed to tell you,” and if she’s usually willing to dish, it’s more than her job is worth to expand that to giving him a phone number, or even a hint about Steve’s address.

He’s fine.

No, really, Clint, he’s fucking _fine._

He knew Steve for four days and they kissed once and then they went their separate ways. He’s literally been on dates that lasted longer than that entire relationship, so it’s not like he had time to get attached or anything.

And of _course_ he knows it wasn’t his fault, Sam. Because Sam himself has said it approximately thirty-eight million times now: there’s your own shit, and then there’s other people’s shit, and you’re not obliged to deal with anybody’s shit but your own. It’s not as if he did anything wrong, and who knows if that little makeout session was even what sent Steve running? He could’ve freaked out about how much the hospital stay was costing, or he could’ve been running from something else (“Personally, I think his secret past in the Mafia was about to catch up with him.” “Really, Sam? A broke asthmatic gangster?” “Hey, you never know, man, don’t assume.”) The point, though, is that Bucky’s worked hard to rebuild his life and he can’t let one weird incident derail it.

He _won’t_ let one weird incident derail it. He swears he won’t. For fuck’s sake, Sam.

Bucky honestly doesn’t see why they’re both making such a fuss. In spite of the Steve thing, he’s doing pretty good right now. Gets out of the hospital only a couple days after Steve does; he’s healing better than anybody expected, the pain’s solidly under control, and he’s still got three weeks of medical leave before he has to go back to his crappy job, which makes this almost like a free vacation. He’s going to go sightseeing, the way people who live in the city usually only do when someone’s visiting from out of town. Maybe he’ll go see a show or two on Broadway, maybe look up some old friends he hasn’t seen since before his army days—hell, he’s got all kinds of perfectly nice, pleasant plans for the immediate future.

Then the world turns gray again.

Nothing causes it, really. He’s just sort of tired one day and not in the mood to do anything, and a little more tired the next, and it gradually starts to feel like a tremendous pain in the ass to get out of bed to run on the treadmill like he’s supposed to. Or go all the way to midtown to get the arm overhauled and reconditioned. Or haul himself to appointment after appointment, never a day without a doctor poking at his injuries and making concerned noises at him. Well, fuck it, he’s a grown man and nobody can make him do anything he doesn’t want to.

And once he’s cancelled most of the appointments, it turns out there’s really not that much reason to leave the apartment at all. Yeah, he goes to the party Clint throws on the roof of the building, and he flirts and smiles and gets a pretty redhead's phone number, but he doesn’t call her. He’s just not feeling it. He’s also been meaning to finally learn how to cook more than the handful of staple recipes he’s been living on since he got out of the Army, and he gets as far as stocking up on groceries, but somehow he keeps finding himself lying on the couch in front of a _Dog Cops_ marathon until he’s too hungry and annoyed to do anything besides order some takeout Chinese and turn in. Then he lies awake for half the night, thinking, _hey, insomnia, we haven’t hung out in a while,_ until he finally drifts off, then oversleeps, then gets up feeling too bleary to accomplish much and repeats the process all over again.

Bucky isn’t stupid, and he’s been down this road before. He knows exactly what’s happening, even knows some of the psychological terms for the crap he’s doing, and he knows it’s not going to get any better if he keeps lying around doing fuck-all about it. But somehow another day passes, and then another, and he still hasn’t done a goddamn thing to pull himself out of this spiral of depression.

Clint and Sam have both been texting him with increasing concern, and in what felt like a stroke of devious genius at the time, he told each of them that he had the flu, but that the other was taking care of him and not to come over and risk contagion. So when somebody starts knocking on his apartment door and he hasn’t ordered any food yet, he figures they’ve finally compared notes and one or both of them is coming over to kick his ass and yell at him until he takes his damn medication. He knows he needs that, and more to the point he deserves it, but the feeling of dread that comes over him at actually having to get off the couch and start fixing this mess is so exhausting that it’s almost more than he can do to get up and answer the door, even after the knocking becomes too insistent to ignore.

What he gets is neither Clint nor Sam, though. Instead, there’s a man on his doorstep who Bucky has never seen before. He stands with a military bearing and is dressed in black literally from head to toe; half his face is obscured by a black eyepatch, with enough visible scarring around it to be indisputably medically necessary rather than some weird hipster-pirate fashion thing.

“Mr. Barnes,” he says, while Bucky stands there staring at the weapon-shaped bulges under the stranger’s coat. “I’m Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this fic is the result of my hearing of "shrinkyclinks" and going, "Jeez, I can't imagine how that would possibly make sense," and then reading a bunch of it to find out, and then liking it, oops. And then I thought maybe I'd write like a 4000-word fluff intro as an excuse to write prompts and "imagine your OTP" stuff, but then I stumbled onto a plot and went, aw, brain, no.
> 
> Send prompts if you would like to. :)


	2. Chapter 2

“Uh,” Bucky says, reaching out to shake the hand Fury is holding out to him. He’s heard of S.H.I.E.L.D., but all he can remember is Strategic Homeland Information, and he can’t for the life of him figure out what an intelligence organization would want with an ex-Army sniper. Of course, he can’t remember how long it’s been since he showered or shaved, either, so he might not _quite_ be firing on all cylinders at the moment.

“May I come in?”

Bucky steps aside, and Fury strides in like a man on a mission, which is a pretty good trick, considering he has to step around a stack of old pizza boxes to do it. “I understand that a few years ago, you were involved in an experiment called Project Winter Soldier,” he says.

“It’s in the records,” Bucky says. The _extremely secret_ records, that is, full of redacted text and nondisclosure agreements, but Nick Fury seems like the type of guy who takes the word “classified” as a joke.

“Along with your psychological profile.” Fury glances around the apartment again, and Bucky has the uncomfortable feeling that the guy notices more with one eye than most people do with both. “In the Army, you were by far the most solid operator to come out of the Project. Expert marksman, twenty-seven confirmed kills in five years, one _hundred_ percent success rate both before and after the amputation.”

“The amputation I had because of that one mission my team fucked up so colossally that we got Tony Stark blown to shit,” Bucky says, with no small degree of surprise. It’s the casualness of the last word that gets him. Most people either hedge about it or they go out of their way to make sure he knows it’s not a big deal, which makes it more of a big deal. Then again, a guy with a missing eye has probably taken some shit in his life, so. “And you may have noticed that my psych profile gets a little iffy once I’m back stateside.”

“Yes. You seemed to be fine as long as you had a gun in your hand and a mission in your head, but after Project Winter Soldier was cancelled, you became directionless. Exhibited signs of PTSD, panic attacks, anxiety, depression. Isolation,” he says, with a pointed glance around the apartment. “Defensiveness. Insomnia. Body dysmorphia. Suicidal urges.”

His file says all that? Well, of course his file says all that. It’s all true, with one exception. “Dysmorphia? The arm works pretty good most of the time. I don’t think I’m especially fucked up about it.”

“You consistently referred to it in your therapy sessions as _the_ arm, not _your_ arm. Also as ‘this thing,’ ‘this stupid hunk of metal,’ and ‘this fucking robot contraption.’ Do you follow now, Mr. Barnes?”

“Yeah, I think I’m maybe starting to catch on.” Okay, maybe his feelings are a little mixed on the arm, which will never be _his_ arm, after all, no matter how well it works on a given day. “So what are you here for, Director? Trying to get me back into that world?”

Fury regards him with one solemn eye. “Trying to save it,” he replies. “Have you ever heard of the Avengers Initiative?

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Your friend Clint Barton is part of it, under the code name Hawkeye.”

“Hawk Guy?” Bucky repeats. He’s starting to wonder when he’s going to wake up, because this is getting absolutely surreal. “Is this some kind of a prank or something?”

“Hawk,” Fury says, and points at the eye that isn’t under a patch. “Eye. And no, this is deadly serious, Mr. Barnes. Clint Barton is one of our top operatives, and he’s been compromised. I’ve come to ask you to help save his life.”

 _Barton’s been compromised._ No, back up a step—Barton’s a, what, a secret agent? And he’s been compromised. What does that mean? Is his cover blown? Is he captured? Injured? Dead? “That… that is extremely very not good,” Bucky hears himself say, as if at a great distance. And then, without meaning to, he adds, “What can I do?”

“Pack whatever you’ll need for at least the next seventy-two hours,” Fury says. “You can clean up on the Quinjet.”

“On the _what_ now?”

 

 **Need a favor,** Bucky texts Sam, from a weirder airplane than he’s ever previously seen in real life. **Can you go to my apt., get key to Clint’s apt. from kitchen junk drawer, & take Lucky for a few days?**

There’s a brief (and, Bucky imagines, stunned) pause before the phone buzzes at him: **So I guess you’re feeling better then.**

Jesus. Figures the lie would catch up with him at the worst possible moment, and now he’s going to have to face Sam’s disappointed expression when he gets home. **PLZ,** he texts. **Will explain everything when back. Scout’s honor.**

Another brief pause, and then Sam sends back, **OK, but this better be a damn good story, B.**

Good? He’s not convinced. It’s going to be an interesting one, though; he can already feel it.

 

Bucky’s hair is still wet, but at least he’s showered and clean-shaven when he steps onto the deck of the helicarrier. It’s… something, this ship. After he took a look around the Quinjet, which has not only a shower but a full bar and mini-kitchen, he decided he wasn’t going to let any of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s amenities surprise him anymore, but the helicarrier shakes his resolve on that front. It’s nothing, though, to the woman walking toward him and Fury as they get off the plane. “Sir,” she addresses Fury, and then she turns to him and, annoyingly, isn’t surprised at all. “Hello, Bucky.”

“Natalie? What are you doing here?”

She smiles tightly. “Natasha Romanoff. Natalie was a cover identity that outlived its usefulness.”

 He shakes his head in disbelief. “I… uh. I guess I owe you an apology for never calling you after Barton’s party.”

“It’s all right. To be perfectly honest, Clint asked me to flirt a little as a personal favor. He thought you could use some cheering up.”

 _Ow._ Well, at least Fury’s already walked away to, well, do whatever it is a S.H.I.E.L.D. director does (currently: striding around frowning at things). Anyway, he has something more important to think about than his own embarrassment: he wants to know what that look in her eyes meant when she said Clint’s name. He’s seen it somewhere before, but he can’t pin it down. “Are you two, uh… do you love him?”

“Love is for children. I owe him a debt.” She pauses. “You were a sniper?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you’ll understand when I say I also have a very specific skillset. I didn’t care who I used it for. Or on. I got on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s radar in a bad way. Clint was sent to kill me. He made a different call.”

“I see.” He adds, in Russian, “<I think maybe he was supposed to recruit me too.>”

Finally, he’s impressed her. “<Good ear. Not many people can tell I’m Russian.>”

“<I’m pretty amazing like that,>” he says, and she gives him a smile that he guesses is as close as she ever comes to actually laughing.

Well, as much fun as this is, they’ve both got things to do. “Doctor Banner,” he calls, to the man he sees approaching. “Word is you can find our friend.”

Banner is… different from most of the people Bucky has seen on the helicarrier so far. Not that he can throw stones about looking unkempt and shaggy, but Banner looks, well, like he’s completely lost in this situation and at the same time not removed enough. “Is that the only word on me?”

“Help Clint Barton and I don’t care what you do on your own time,” Bucky says, with a shrug.

“Gentlemen, you might want to step inside in a minute,” Romanoff says. “It’s going to get a little hard to breathe.”

“Is this a submarine?” Banner says. “Really? They want me in a submerged pressurized metal container?”

“Oh, no,” Bucky assures him. “This is much worse,” and he leaves Banner to figure it out as he heads toward the nearest staircase.

 

They have a mission for him, and they have a suit.

It’s mostly black, which any real sniper can tell you is not the best for blending in at night—given the choice, he would’ve taken multi-cam—but Bucky supposes they don’t want him to do much blending in. The goggles are a higher-tech pair than he’s ever had before, but intuitive to work, and the dust mask has obviously been made for his face, a nice trick considering they’ve never brought him in for a fitting. The tactical vest is nice, too, a solid combination of leather and Kevlar, even if all the damn buckles and straps take a ridiculously long time to get into. If there’s a next time for this adventure, he’s going to have some design input on the costume, whether they like it or not.

Although, actually, there’s a way for him to have some major design input right now.

“Was there something wrong with your left sleeve, Barnes?” the little balding guy—Coulson—asks him, as he walks into the control room.

“Not if you want the arm’s plates to shred the material, overheat, and catch on fire while I’m working.” Bucky shrugs, sliding his knife back into its sheath. For ordinary wear, sure, sleeves are fine, especially since he makes sure not to buy them too tight-fitting, but for combat, the second it takes to jerk the plates free of fabric that’s bound up in them might be the difference between somebody’s life and somebody’s death. “You got the target?”

“We got a hit. Sixty-seven percent match,” one of the techs says, from their computer. “Wait, cross-match—seventy-nine percent.”

“Location?” says Coulson.

“Stuttgart, Germany,” the tech says. “28 Koenigstrasse. He not exactly hiding.”

“Barnes,” says Fury. “You’re up.”

 

Bucky can’t say what he’s expecting, but it’s not a guy in a cape and a helmet threatening an old man with a magic staff. But when he hears the magical asshole say, “Look to your elder, people—let him be an example,” he doesn’t question for a minute whether it’s the right time to open fire.

Unfortunately, Quinjets don’t exactly hover with perfect steadiness and the helmet is functional as well as really freaky-looking, and the burst of fire from his M4 only seems to cheese Loki off.

It does break whatever spell the crowd seems to be under, though, and people suddenly start to scream and scatter in chaos, which for Bucky’s purposes is adequate. Give him a clear field and he’s more than willing to jump down into the fray and go after the guy with his knives instead.

He fights wordlessly, saving his breath, coming in hard and fast and merciless. This man has killed more people than Bucky has in his entire career just in the last two days, and he has no illusions at all about letting him surrender. He fights to disable, to maim, to kill. And when the glowy blue spear thing comes down on Bucky’s metal arm so hard that it would lop a flesh limb clean off his body, Bucky understands that Loki is the same. It sends a shiver through him, how well he understands this, but it doesn’t interfere with his fighting. Loki, though… Loki is stronger and faster than he is. He read the dossier, but he took everything about “Asgardians” with a grain of salt, figuring he’d believe these guys were super-powerful aliens when he saw actual proof of it.

Well, fuck, he’s seeing proof now.

The fight ends when Loki knocks him sprawling, and he lies on the ground, wind knocked out of him—damn him for letting himself get so out of shape this last month, with the pizza and takeout, it’s a mistake that could very well cost him his life—while Loki strides toward him, coming in for the coup de grace. Bucky is trying to push himself up with the dented, now blatantly malfunctioning metal arm when a new voice comes over the comms.

“Agent Romanoff, did you miss me?” it says, and then…

And then, Bucky cannot freaking believe this, a blast of energy knocks Loki backward and Iron Man comes swooping into the picture.

Bucky stares, and then he does manage to push himself up, as Stark’s robot suit settles onto the ground with one of his—repulsors, is that right?—aimed at the Asgardian. “Make a move, Reindeer Games,” Stark says, and when Loki drops his armor, he adds, “Good move.”

“Stark,” Bucky says, pushing the goggles back and walking up beside him.

The helmet turns toward him, then retracts, and Bucky looks into Tony Stark’s face for the first time since Afghanistan.

“Hey,” Stark says. “Who’s this guy?”

 

Bucky is quiet in the jet while Natasha flies them and Loki back toward the base. Stark, on the other hand, is never quiet, and starts nagging him about the arm almost as soon as Loki is secured in a passenger seat. When Bucky cranks it in a circle to reset it, then winces at the way it strains his trapezius despite the reinforcements, Stark says, “Let me take a look at that,” and starts rummaging under the seats for a toolkit.

Bucky draws back. Sure, he has _some_ mixed feelings, but they don’t extend to trusting either life or limb to Stark. “It’ll wait.”

“It’s not like we’ve got something better to do for the next two hours. Besides, I guarantee I’m smarter than whoever designed that. Who was it, anyway? Hammer? Pym? Skynet?”

“You really don’t remember me, do you?” Bucky says.

Stark frowns. “Should I?”

“Probably not. We only met for a few minutes. Give it a shot, though,” Bucky hears himself say. “Take about five years off my face, lose the hair, give my old left arm back… Nothing? How about if you put me in the front seat of a Humvee, does that ring any bells?”

He sees the moment of recognition, and there’s a little twinge of satisfaction there, as well as a spike of annoyance at Fury when he realizes that neither of them was warned about this. Stark is unaccustomed to not knowing things and doesn’t much like it; Bucky’s used to living in a world where need-to-know is the norm, but this was pretty fucking need-to-know. “Well,” Stark says, “that’s a thing.”

“Fury didn’t tell me he was calling you in,” he says, letting the subtext— _if he had, I wouldn’t be here—_ hang in the air.

“There’s a lot of things Fury doesn’t tell you,” Stark acknowledges curtly. “What happened to you after the… convoy?”

“Six weeks in a cave, and an exchange of hostages they almost cancelled because of your stunt with the iron suit.” Bucky is trying to stop, he’s _trying,_ but the words keep coming in spite of him: “If I’d gotten out of there two weeks earlier, maybe they could’ve saved my arm. And if you’d waited another year to come out with Stark Industries’ next prosthetic, before I had time to convince the brass I could do as much as I needed with this one, I might still be in the army. You have no idea how long you’ve been ruining my life, Stark. And you? You _walked away_ from all of it.”

Stark stares at him. Then he says, “I’ve got a time bomb in my chest. A handful of shrapnel that’s trying every day to work its way into my heart, and this,” he taps the glowing ring in the middle of the armor’s chest plate, “is the only thing stopping it, so I don’t think I’d exactly call that walking away unscathed.”

“Oh, boo fucking hoo. I’m not here to help you ease your conscience. I’m here to stop Loki, and then I’m headed right back to my tiny apartment and my friends who don’t deserve half the shit they put up with from a broken-down vet who got chewed up by the system that made you rich. And you’re gonna go back to gambling and dating supermodels and completely forget about all the lives you ruined by not thinking beyond your profit margin.”

Stark stares at him, and then he gets mad. He opens his mouth to speak—but it’s probably fortunate for Bucky, and for everything that comes after, that before he has a chance, there’s a massive clap of thunder, and something—somebody—moving too fast to follow slams into the plane.

Just like that, Loki is gone, and Stark doesn’t so much as glance at Bucky as he swears and dives out of the plane in pursuit.

 _Fuck,_ Bucky thinks. He’d be just as happy to let Stark go hang, but Loki is his only link to Clint, and the mission is to get Clint _and_ Fury’s blue cube of mystery back, regardless of his personal feelings. He grabs a parachute, straps it on, and is out the side of the Quinjet after them before Natasha can stop him.

It’s not as if they’re hard to find. Bucky has read the briefing, and by the time he hits the ground, he’s put it together that it had to be the other Asgardian, Thor. Once he knows that, it’s not hard to find the fight—not with fucking _lightning bolts_ as a dead giveaway. But when he gets there, a man in a robot suit of armor and a man with arms the size of tree trunks are battling it out and he’s the guy with next to nothing. Good reflexes, _peak_ reflexes for a human but not a superhuman, one metal arm, and…

Well, he did manage to hold onto the gun. “Hey!” he shouts, and fires a burst of shots into the air.

Astonishingly, Thor and Stark both turn to look at him, and too late, Bucky realizes he’s got nothing to follow it up with. Fine. He points the gun at Thor and says, “Put the hammer down.”

“Oh, big mistake, he loves his hammer—” Stark is saying, when Thor abruptly knocks him out of the way and strides forward.

“You want me to put the hammer DOWN?” he shouts, and charges.

 

Thor is not, inherently, a bad guy. Bucky knows that because he sees the look that comes over his face when he realizes that he’s just smashed a soft human with what could easily have been a fatal blow. The fact that Bucky got his arm up in time saved him from catastrophic injury at the very least. The fact that the arm was basically flattened by the hammer is survivable. But the fact that the arm works like an arm instead of like some clunky piece of machinery because it’s wired into his remaining muscle and nerve structure—

Well, screaming himself hoarse turns out to be a reasonably efficient way to end a battle, but it’s not the way Bucky would’ve picked, given a wider range of options.

By the time Natasha gets there with a med kit, Thor has apologized about seven hundred times, Stark has gathered up what’s left of his arm, and Bucky is on the ground, shaking, clutching the stump of the arm with his right hand and trying to ride this out without it turning into a full-blown flashback. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Loki hasn’t fled the scene. Then Natasha puts a nerve block into his shoulder, and probably something else, too, because after that he loses track of things completely for a little while.

When he wakes up, he’s looking at an unfamiliar hexagon-patterned ceiling, and it takes him a moment to put it together: he’s back on the helicarrier. He pushes himself up instinctively, before he remembers that he shouldn’t be able to, and that’s how he discovers that there’s a new arm attached to him.

“It’s an exact copy,” Phil Coulson says, when he looks at it in surprise. Coulson is sitting by the bunk in what Bucky presumes is med bay, with enough papers and folders and so forth spread out on a table in front of him that he must have been here a while. “Stark was able to use the original blueprints to make a duplicate. He wanted to incorporate some upgrades, but Dr. Banner convinced him to keep the original model intact.”

“Blueprints, huh?” Bucky is still woozy enough that he’s fixating on insignificant details, not a great sign for him in general, but he has to ask: “How’d he get them so fast? Army brass don’t just cut through red tape to release classified designs. Not unless I’ve been out a lot longer than I thought.”

“Director Fury called in a favor.”

“Oh,” Bucky says. He flexes the arm experimentally; it seems to be in working order. Then he sees that Stark has added his own little asinine touch. The star on the shoulder used to be U.S. Army white; now it’s the same bright, blaring red as Stark’s armor. “The fuck,” he says.

“Stark didn’t tell any of us he was planning that touch. We can arrange for a paint job if you don’t like it. It could be worse; he wanted to add a _k_.” and when Bucky gives him a blank look, he pronounces it: “Star-k,” _star_ with an exaggerated _k_ sound at the end. “We talked him out of it.”

“He wanted to _sign_ it? Christ, what an asshole,” Bucky says, leaning back. It’s still better than no arm—and if he’s painfully honest with himself, he suspects it does look pretty damn badass—but that doesn’t mean he has to like the fact that Stark’s hands were on any part of him while he was unconscious.

“You might want to cut Tony some slack,” Coulson says, in his usual mild tone. “It took him several hours to replicate and attach the arm while the gamma search was running, and that was after you made some fairly intense comments.”

“Comm… oh, _shit.”_ It’s coming back to Bucky now, what he said to Stark right before he passed out: _Big man in a suit of armor. Take that off, and what are you? I know guys with none of what you’ve got worth ten of you. You wouldn’t know real sacrifice if it walked up and bit you in the ass._ And, oh, God, the worst one… “Did I really tell him to put the armor back on and we’d go a few rounds?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Fuck.” Bucky gives the arm another experimental twist, wondering if Stark would have bothered to embed a bomb in it. He wouldn’t put anything past the guy at this point. “Any word on Barton? Or the cube?”

“The search algorithm should be returning results any time. Natasha is also interrogating Loki as we speak. One of those things should get us a result within the hour. If you’re feeling up to it, Fury wants you to suit up and go back to the bridge.”

“Yeah. Okay.” Bucky stands up, a little shaky, but mobile. He goes into the little bathroom off med bay and splashes some water on his face, pleasantly surprised how well the arm is working. He’s giving the new fingers a workout with the buckles on the tactical vest—they’re a little stiff, but he remembers this from the first time, they’ll break in quickly—and wondering if there’s any coffee on this boat when Coulson says, “Who’s Steve?”

Bucky’s new hand slips and smacks into the edge of the stainless steel sink. “What?”

“You talk in your sleep. You said his name a few times. Steve. Who is that?”

Bucky shakes his head. “I…”

“You don’t have to tell me if it’s personal.”

“No,” Bucky says, “it’s just… I’m not sure why I would’ve—”

That’s when the explosion rocks the helicarrier.

 

After, when things are starting to settle out a little—when the medics have helped everybody who can be helped, when Clint is in a recovery room with Natasha watching over him and Stark is wandering around in shock and Thor is gone and Banner is most likely dead and Coulson definitely is—Bucky curls up in the darkest corner of the helicarrier he can find, with his arms hugged tightly to his chest.

The last two hours have been… well, they’ve been a shit show, no other way to put it. He and Stark worked together on the engines without thinking, because it was that or everybody died; it was a little weird how well they managed it when the mission was clear, actually. But now, although the stakes are even higher, nobody seems to know what to do. Even Fury seems shaken by Coulson’s loss; he’s hiding it well, but Bucky knows.

Which is why he finally pushes himself up with the—his—shiny new metal arm and strides out of the shadows.

“Sir,” he says, from where Fury stands at a console, with Hill behind him.

Fury turns. “Barnes,” he says. And then, “You agreed to stay until Barton was recovered. If you’re looking to disembark, Hill can find you a shuttle.”

“I’m a soldier, sir,” Bucky says. “At this point, I’m here until we finish the mission.” And then, “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“Granted.”

“We’re fucked, sir.”

Fury turns. “Tell me something I don’t know next time,” he says, in a voice that makes Bucky suddenly uncertain about the wisdom of this plan.

Well, one thing he’s never been accused of is being able to keep his mouth shut. “This plan, this, this super-team of yours,” he forges ahead. “It was a good idea. It just… it just didn’t go far enough. Banner said something earlier today—he said, we’re not a team, we’re a chemical mixture, a time bomb. I wasn’t the best at science in school, but I remember this one thing. You wanted a bunch of things to turn into one other thing, sometimes, what you really needed was a catalyst.”

Fury turns. “Tell me what you’re trying to say, Barnes.”

“We’re not going to turn into a team unless we get that one thing we’re missing, sir.” He takes a deep breath. “That’s why you need to make Romanoff the team leader.”

Fury’s good eye focuses on Bucky’s face. “What makes you think Romanoff wants the job?”

“I know she doesn’t, sir. But she’s the only one who can do it. Stark’s a loose cannon unless he has a clear mission. Banner… uh, doesn’t react so well to stress. Thor seems solid, but, you know, they have a saying about what happens when the only tool you have is a hammer. Clint’s just been brainwashed, maybe tortured; he’s looking to kick some ass, but he’s not stable enough to lead. And I’m a soldier. I can follow orders, but I need someone to give them.”

“You’ve thought this through,” Maria Hill says, from behind him.

“Yeah, and here you thought I was just a pretty face.”

“As it happens,” Fury says, “I’ve already asked Romanoff the same thing. She declined. Says she’s a spy, not a commander.”

Hill looks at Fury, then at Bucky, then back at Fury again. “Sir,” she says, “Barnes makes a good point. There always was supposed to be another Avenger.”

“Last I heard, Rogers was in the wind.”

“We have the facial recognition scanners,” she says. “We could send Barnes to explain the new situation. Sir… at this point, what do we have to lose?”

 _Everything,_ Bucky thinks. “Who’s Rogers?” he asks.

Hill taps on her data tablet a few times, then pulls a flash drive out of a socket and hands it to him. “Here are his files. You can read up on the way.” Then she says, “You’ll need to find a pilot.”

 

Bucky finds Clint and Natasha still in the recovery room. Natasha has her arm around Clint’s shoulders with an expression of fierce protectiveness that cuts right through him. It’s a look he recognizes all too well. “I have a mission,” he tells them both, cutting them off before Natasha can tell him to fuck off and give Clint some space. “Can either of you fly a Quinjet?”

“I can,” Clint says, quickly enough that Bucky suspects he’s glad to have anything to take his mind off what just happened to him.

“Good. We’re going recruiting.” Just then, Bucky’s phone beeps, and he looks; it’s the coordinates Hill promised. “Huh,” he says. “That’s weird. Clint, it says we gotta go back to Brooklyn.”

Clint nods. “Who’s the target?”

“No idea. Let’s find out.” The S.H.I.E.L.D. datapads are neat little devices. Bucky powers his up, pops the flash drive in—and stares for a long time before he shoves the datapad into Clint’s hands, so that Clint can proceed to do the very same thing.

“What is it?” Natasha asks, plucking the tablet out of Clint’s hands. She tips her head to the side, but there’s no spark of recognition, certainly not the shock that might as well have just laid Bucky out flat on the floor. “Who is he?”

“Not a word, Clint,” Bucky says. “Not one fucking word. Just suit up and let’s go get this over with.”


	3. Chapter 3

The building where Steve lives is the definition of a shithole. Seriously, Bucky’s half afraid the stairs are going to give out under his weight before he makes it to the door. When he does, he shoots a quick glance back at Natasha for reassurance before bringing up his left hand to knock.

“Who is it?” says a resigned voice, and Bucky feels his heart jump up into his throat.

After a few seconds when he tries to say something and can’t, Natasha calls out, “This is the police. We’d like to know if you’ve got any information on a missing persons case in this area,” and then she raises her eyebrows at him and shrugs. Well. Not technically a lie, but he’s not at all sure what’s going to happen, right up to the moment when Steve opens the door and their eyes meet.

“Hey, punk,” Bucky says, his voice hoarse.

Steve stares at him for a long moment. Then he swings the door wide and steps back, admitting them to a tiny living room. Steve’s made an effort: everything is shabby—he’s guessing the only thing here manufactured in the last decade is the computer on a rickety table in the corner, and that probably only barely makes the cut—but it’s as clean as a place this old and lived-in can be, and the drab walls are covered in what Bucky assumes is Steve’s art. It’s a liberal mix of styles and media: modern cityscapes and old ones; watercolors of Central Park in the fall and Rockefeller Square at Christmas; a lot of sketches of people—a middle-aged blonde woman in an old-fashioned nurse’s cap, a young brunette with arresting eyes and hair done up in victory rolls, a man who looks enough like Tony Stark to be his brother, and a handful of soldiers in what look like WWII uniforms. And then, as his eyes track around the room, he sees what he’s been looking for. Without waiting for permission, he walks into the small kitchen area and picks up the cleanest, brightest thing in this apartment, the red-white-and-blue shield that he’s seen in a hundred of the old war documentaries his dad loved to watch. It makes a faintly metallic sound as it slides along the edge of the table. On a whim, he slips his left arm through the leather strap, brittle with age, and hoists it up above eye level, as if he’s ready to block an incoming rocket. The motion feels oddly natural. Intuitive, maybe. The shield is a well-made tool. Like him.

Steve makes a choked noise. “Bucky,” he says.

Bucky lowers his arm. “Natasha, could you give us a minute?” he asks, before he realizes that the door is already closing softly behind her.

Steve glances after her. “This isn’t a good neighborhood for a lady to be alone,” he says.

“Tasha’s a certified badass. You don’t need to worry about her safety.” He hardly hesitates at all before adding, “Captain.”

“Agent,” Steve replies evenly, running his eyes up and down Bucky’s outfit. “You were a plant, weren’t you? In the hospital. Assigned to bring me back in. That’s the kind of thing they do.”

“You’re probably not gonna believe this, Steve, but I’ve been running with S.H.I.E.L.D. for less than thirty-six hours, and I only found out about you, like, twenty-two minutes ago. I mean, I heard when they found the plane last year, like everybody, but I thought they said they didn’t find Captain America’s body.”

“Technically, they didn’t,” Steve says, flopping down on the couch. “Does this look like Captain America’s body to you?”

Bucky’s mouth is dry. “They gave me the files,” he says, “but they didn’t say if it happened before or after the plane went down in the Atlantic.”

“Both.” Steve laughs, low and bitter. “Schmidt… did something to me with the Tesseract. I could feel it undoing the serum. Honestly… I think that was what made it so easy to put the plane down. I’d gotten everything I wanted, I was saving the world, and the minute I succeeded, I was going to be forced to give it all up again. I remember thinking that maybe it was just as well if I never made it home. There must’ve been just enough of the serum left to keep me alive when I went into the ice. And when I woke up… you know, they told me the war was over and that we won. Nobody wanted to talk about what we lost.” He laughs again, in the way that means nothing’s funny, and turns away from Bucky. “You didn’t come here to listen to a sob story. Go back to S.H.I.E.L.D. Tell them I’ve more than served my tour of duty. Unless Fury wants to issue a warrant for my arrest, I don’t have to go back. I don’t have to do anything.”

Bucky takes a deep breath. He wants to say… he wants to reach his hand out and… but this isn’t about him _or_ Steve, not anymore. “Remember that crack Clint made about my wallet?” he asks, instead.

“What?”

“Nothing in it but an expired condom and a picture of my sister’s kids. Yeah, very funny, but you know, Clint was half right.” He got his wallet out of his locker before they got on the Quinjet, and now he flips it open and slides a photo out of a plastic sleeve. “Here,” he says, holding it out to Steve. “This is my sister Becca and her family. She’s a dermatologist, lives in Ewing. Her husband teaches AP history to high schoolers. The kids are Jason and Emily. They’re twins. Last year I sent each of them a big Star Wars Lego set on their birthday and they told me I was the best uncle ever.”

Steve looks at the picture for long enough to be polite, then hands it back. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because if we do nothing, then forty-eight hours from now, those kids are going to be either dead or living under a regime that’ll be as bad as the Nazis ever were. There’s a new threat that’s not even from this planet, and they’ll win unless we stop them. My team, I mean.” Bucky hesitates, and then he tries it out, Fury’s word: “The Avengers.”

“Avengers. Well, with a name like that, it sounds like you’ve got everything under control.”

“Yeah, it does. Fury’s got some of the best people on the planet for this team, not to mention one guy from _off_ the planet. Except when you see us from the inside? We’re a bunch of walking disasters. Natasha, out there, she’s one of the smartest, most capable people I’ve ever met, but she’s got a past, and she doesn’t trust herself to make the hard calls. Clint’s sort of the same. Thor—wait till you hear about Thor—he’s a crazy good fighter, but he tends to listen to his gut instead of his brain. We’ve also got Tony Stark, who’s a high-functioning alcoholic narcissist with a metal suit, and Bruce Banner, who’s a genius with some pretty major anger-management issues. And then there’s this other guy, this ex-army sniper, I still can’t figure out why they put him on the team, because he’s really good at shooting people and punching stuff, but that doesn’t mean he can lead worth a damn. And that’s the main thing: him and all those other idiots, what they need is a leader.”

“You think I’m up to leading a team in the field?” Steve does the lopsided smile that puts a new crack in Bucky’s heart every time, and coughs, probably on purpose, to let Bucky hear the wheeze. “Have you looked at me lately?”

“I’m not here for Captain America, you dumbass. See, unlike a lot of people who just watched those bad old movies they made about him, I’ve actually read up on the guy. Captain America was a propaganda tool who looked good on camera. But Steve Rogers? That guy was _smart,_ man. He was a first-class strategist, and that’s not something I say lightly. He planned this raid on a Hydra fortress that still blows the military historians’ hair back. Not to mention that in the middle of World War II, he not only ran a team of guys from the most different backgrounds you could imagine and made it work, he made those guys into the gold standard of military effectiveness. You know that to this day, when a  unit does something way better than anybody thought they were capable of, sets a record for a drill or a high score or something, you’ll still hear people say, ‘Good work, guys, you really ran a 107th out there’? That’s the guy I’m after. Because we’ve got the eyes and the hands and the muscle and, okay, I’ll give Stark this one, the brains, but the thing we don’t have? The thing we don’t have is a heart. And that’s where you come in.” Bucky holds out his hand—yeah, _his_ hand, the right one—and says, “Help me out, Steve. We need you.”

Steve looks at his hand, then at his eyes. He takes a deep, labored breath. Then he says, “No, Bucky. I’m sorry, but no. The guy you want is dead.”

“Okay,” Bucky says softly. “Okay.” He turns around, walks out, and pulls the door shut behind him.

Natasha raises an eyebrow at him as he comes down the stairs from the walkup. “No luck?”

“Give it a minute,” Bucky says.

He only knew Steve Rogers for four days, before this. Sometimes, though, four days is all you need. It’s only about two minutes later that the door of the apartment slams and Steve comes down the steps with the shield strapped across his narrow shoulders. “Ma’am,” he says to Natasha, curtly. He turns and holds out the photo that Bucky very deliberately left on the living room table. “I want to be clear that I’m not re-enlisting,” he says. “When this is over, S.H.I.E.L.D. lets me walk away, no questions asked.”

“Okay,” Bucky says. He doesn’t really have the authority to bargain, but, sure, he’ll back that one up. He takes the photo back and tucks it down inside the breast pocket of the tactical vest.

“I’ll give you the same deal I gave the Howling Commandos,” Steve says, and is it Bucky’s imagination, or does he look a little taller? No, he decides, it’s just that Steve is standing straight for the first time since Bucky’s known him, shoulders squared, jaw thrust out. This is the Steve Rogers who’s already been through a war. “You obey my orders, you do what I tell you, and I’ll do my damnedest not to get you killed.”

“With all due respect, Steve,” Bucky says, “your job is to damn well get me killed today if doing that saves the world.”

It’s somehow both the right thing and the wrong thing to say at the same time. “What do I call you two?” is what Steve finally asks.

“Natasha Romanoff,” says Natasha. “Codename: Black Widow.”

Shit. It honestly hasn’t occurred to Bucky until now that everybody else seems to have a cool call sign but him. (Well, and Thor, but come on: _Thor.)_ But in the end, if they have to call him something, he’ll go back to the program that made him. It wasn’t always pretty, but it’s who he is. “Codename: Winter Soldier,” he says. “Sir.”

Steve nods. “You have a C&C?”

“We’ll use the Quinjet as our mobile command base,” Natasha says. “There’s no time to go back to the helicarrier. I have a message from Stark that we need to meet him in Manhattan. He says there’s something happening that we’ll have to see to believe.”

Steve snorts. “After the Red Skull, I doubt very much is going to surprise me.”

 _We’ll see about that, punk,_ Bucky thinks. _We’ll see._


	4. Chapter 4

There’s a hole in the sky over Manhattan.

“Did you stop for takeout?” Stark, in the suit, yells over the comms, as Clint zips the Quinjet between skyscrapers—Bucky’s pretty sure this is at the _holy shit_ level of FAA violations but then, the sky is also full of _aliens,_ so there’s that—and there’s nothing a soldier can do at this point but put his hands in the life of his pilot and hope like hell that Clint is better at flying than he is at fixing a busted sink or hooking up a DVR. His metal hand tightens on the arm of his seat and he looks over at Steve, but Steve is plastered to the window, staring. “Hey,” he says, “you okay? I know it’s a lot to process—”

 _“Shh,”_ Steve says, holding up a hand, and Bucky blinks, then nods, not that Steve sees. He’s watching the patterns, and when he does turn back, he’s completely focused on the problem. “Airborne units aren’t firing on strategic targets,” he says. “The good news is, they’re not organized. Bad news is, we’ll have a lot of civilian casualties. We’ve gotta set up a perimeter, keep them inside it and evac as many noncombatants as possible. Clint, go ahead and take a shot on Loki, but after that we have to get to ground level to help.”

“How—” Bucky shakes his head. How’d he suss all of that out so fast, coming into this cold, with only as much intel as Natasha could feed him on the short flight across boroughs? Because he’s Steve Rogers, that’s how. That’s why they brought him along, isn’t it?

“Natasha,” Clint says, and she calls back, “I got it,” and aims at the balcony, where, ye gods, literally, Thor is fighting Loki and Loki is somehow holding his own with the shiny magic spear thing. Natasha fires the Quinjet’s guns, but Loki returns fire with a bolt of blue energy that bursts on the hull, sending the plane spiraling. Bucky, for one, did not sign up to be in a crashing airplane today; the drop leaves him shaken, and he swears profusely while he’s struggling out of the flight harness and doing a visual scan of his teammates for injuries.

“Are those weapons based on the Tesseract?” Steve yells, and for a guy who once theoretically died in a plane, he doesn’t seem nearly bothered enough by this crash landing.

“How’d you know that?” Clint asks.

“Hydra had the same idea in 1943. If we shut down the Tesseract, we shut them down too.”

“Stay in the jet, Steve,” Bucky says, and flips on the monitors, the way he saw Natasha do earlier, for a 360 view. “It’s armor-plated, so it’s probably the safest place in Manhattan right now.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, Barnes.” Steve’s out of his own harness already and opening the door. “You want me to lead, I have to see the situation. Those screens can only show me street-level.”

“Fine, but if you get killed, I will fucking murder you,” Bucky yells back. One of the alien _things_ is approaching. He jams his goggles down, shoves the dust mask on, and grabs his gun, putting a blast of fire in its chest. The alien—the Chitauri, he guesses is the word—is the most disturbing thing he’s ever seen, and he’s been in multiple war zones. At least everything else he’s fought has been human. The Chitauri are subtly _off,_ long fingers with too many joints and a jaw that unhinges too far, revealing too many oddly shaped teeth. He lunges forward, reaches out with the metal hand, thinks, _C’mon, Stark, prove that you’re as much of a mechanical genius you think you are,_ and tightens the fingers around the next Chitauri’s throat. It collapses in the same way that particular soft spot does on humans, and Bucky nods as he kicks the body away, grimly satisfied. He didn’t wake up this morning wanting to kill aliens, but at least that proves they _can_ be killed.

“Bucky,” Steve says. “There are civilians trapped in that building over there.” He’s climbed up on top of the Quinjet and he’s crouching with the shield in front of him, too exposed, but able to see. “Get those cops and tell them to take the people in those buildings out through basements and subways as much as they can, then set up a perimeter back at 39th. Clint, Natasha, can you cover him?”

“Sure they can, but who’s covering you?” Bucky demands.

“Don’t worry about me, that’s an order! Go!”

Bucky has one option, and that’s to follow those orders, then try to get back here to rejoin the group before Steve winds up dead. So he does it. He runs like hell, and when he comes to some cops who are trying to figure out what to aim their service pistols at, he relays Steve’s orders in rapid-fire patter, not even bothering to check if they’re listening to him before he turns to face the next Chitauri and— _bam_ —puts the metal fist through its chest.

When he looks back, they’re doing exactly what he told them to, so there’s that.

He stays at the perimeter for a while, long enough to be sure they’re set up as well as they can be, and he’s turning back when he hears the sizzle of lightning over the comms, and hears Steve say, “Thor! What’s the story upstairs?”

“Who is this man?” the Asgardian booms.

“Best tactician Planet Earth had available, Thor, we’re all listening to him and so should you,” Bucky shouts, and apparently getting whacked with a magic hammer and living to tell the tale is exactly it takes to get Thor to trust you when you vouch for another obvious crazy person, because he doesn’t argue about it.

“The power surrounding the cube is impenetrable,” he says, and Stark puts in his two cents: “Thor’s right, we gotta deal with these guys.”

“We _are_ fucking dealing with them,” Bucky says, punching the metal fist through another one’s face mask. 

“I’d feel a hell of a lot better about the rest of them if I put an arrow through Loki’s eye,” says Barton.

“Hey,” Steve says, and holy shit, Bucky hasn’t snapped to attention like this since Basic. Steve can put a weight of command behind his words when he wants to. “Save it. This team can’t afford to fall apart right now. Here’s what we’re gonna do: we’ve got Stark up top, and he’s gonna need a…” His words trail off in the rumble of a motorcycle engine, and Bucky makes it back to the scene just in time to see Banner pulling up.

“Nice wheels, Banner,” he says, and Banner just rolls his eyes, stepping off the bike and moving toward them.

“So,” he says, “this all seems horrible.”

“Doctor Banner,” says Steve.

Banner gapes at him in surprise. “You’re… Steve Rogers,” he says.

Steve manages a smile. “For my sins,” he says, and Bucky finally catches up and remembers: the reason Banner is the Hulk now is that he was trying to create something like the super-soldier serum that Steve got way back in 1943. Of course he would’ve buried himself in research on the original version, so of course he recognizes the pre-upgrade version of Captain America.

“Heads up, guys, I’m bringing the party to you,” Stark says, suddenly, and then he swings around a corner and there’s a mind-blowingly massive thing that Bucky can only _possibly_ describe as a space whale right behind him.

“Doctor Banner,” Steve says, “now might be a really good time to get angry.”

“That’s my secret, Captain Rogers,” Banner says, throwing a grin back over his shoulder as he walks toward the… ship… robot… creature. “I’m always angry.”

Steve’s face, when Banner changes, is pretty incredible. But then Bucky sees what else is about to happen, with just enough advance notice to run forward. When the Hulk punches the space whale and its own momentum sends it space-whale-ass over space-whale-teacups, he grabs the shield from Steve’s hands and swings in close to him and Natasha, hoisting it over his own head and blocking a sudden fall of debris from crushing all three of them.

He’s standing there panting, with Natasha to his left, under maximum coverage from the shield, and Steve to his right, under maximum coverage from his own body, when Clint lets out a wolf whistle from behind him. Bucky jerks his arm away, turning to give Clint a glare that’s probably significantly reduced in fearsomeness by the fact that nobody can actually see his face. Then Steve starts coughing—which is hardly a surprise; with the amount of cement dust and God knows what else in the air, it’s a miracle that the rest of them aren’t—and Bucky pulls off the dust mask and shoves it into his hands. “Here. Don’t give me any of your stupid _I don’t need help_ crap, either. You can’t give orders if you’re choking to death.”

Steve glowers at him, but he takes the mask, and then Romanoff says, “Guys?” and all of them turn to see the _four more fucking space whales_ coming through the portal in the sky.

There’s a moment of stunned silence, and then Stark says, “Call it, Captain.”

Steve also watches them for a moment, and then he slaps on the mask and pulls himself up to his full height. “Okay, listen up,” he says, and he throws out orders left and right, fast and efficient, while Bucky realizes that he’s just stupidly deprived himself of the thing that hides his face right when he’s going to stand here gaping like a dork. Bonus to Steve having it: less hacking and dying; drawback: with the rest of his face covered, there are no distractions for anybody who hypothetically might be having completely situation-inappropriate feelings about the intensity of those blue eyes. That’s how he almost misses Steve’s order: “And Natasha, you and Bucky keep the fighting here.”

“Here where you are?” Bucky repeats in disbelief.

“He has a point, Steve,” Natasha adds, more gently. “You need cover.”

“Well, _someone_ keeps taking my shield,” Steve points out, as if having a round chunk of metal makes it otherwise perfectly reasonable for a hundred-pound asthmatic to be in a war zone. But the next wave hits them and there’s nothing for him to do but shove the shield back into Steve’s hands and fight like hell, trying his best to stay between Steve and any attackers, until they’re clear again.

By the time there’s a break in the pattern of attackers, a second to regroup, Bucky is winded and nursing what he suspects are at least two broken ribs, probably three. Natasha, on the other hand, has one of their own weapons that she’s turned against them—he thinks this is the third or fourth time in this fight that she’s done that; how does she keep doing that?—and still seems to be in pretty good shape. “None of this is gonna mean a damn thing if we don’t close that portal,” she says.

“What are you thinking?” he asks her.

“I need to get up there.”

 “You’ll need a ride,” Steve points out.

Natasha looks up, and her eyes follow one of the aliens that has… well, it’s basically a flying motorcycle, which would be awesome if they weren’t all in the possession of homicidal aliens. From Natasha’s expression, she’s thinking that one of them is about to be in the possession of Natasha. “You’re crazy,” Bucky tells her. “I really respect that. You want a boost?”

She nods, and he kneels and puts the metal arm up—this is going to hurt, but strain some injuries or save a city, it’s not really a choice—and when she takes a running leap, he vaults her up onto the next speeder thing that passes. He has just enough time to smile, because in all honesty, Natasha Romanoff landing on a flying alien and kicking its ass is a thing of absolute beauty, and then things get even more interesting because a new wave of aliens comes charging up the street he’s trying to hold and isn’t this just beautiful, now they’ve got laser cannons for him to deal with.

“Bucky!” Steve says, and tosses him the shield.

“Don’t you dare!” He grabs it on reflex and is about to throw it back when Steve vanishes through a doorway. It’s the vestibule of a bank, probably got reinforced glass, so at least it’s not a totally unreasonable cover.

“It’s fine, I’ll be perfectly safe in here. Use the shield to deflect the beams back at them.”

“I thought the whole point is it absorbs vibration!”

“You can use it a couple different ways. It’s not hard. You just have to get the angle right.”

Bucky braces his feet behind the shield and tries angling it, and the resulting blast almost knocks him over. “Not _hard?_ Steven Grant Rogers, I am going to kill you!”

“Keep trying! You’ll get the hang of it.”

“You know, when I gave you that speech about how the 107th was the best ever, I didn’t realize that what you did to motivate people is get them so pissed off at you that they have to hurry up and win so they can beat the crap out of you afterward!”

Steve is laughing, and Bucky is bashing aliens left and right with the shield and the metal arm interchangeably, when Natasha’s voice comes over the comms. “I have the scepter,” she calls, “I can shut the portal down.”

“Do it,” Steve says.

“No, wait,” says Stark, and Bucky is opening his mouth to say _Wait? Are you crazy or just a complete fucking idiot?_ when Stark adds, “I got a nuke coming in. It’s gonna blow in less than a minute.”

“A nuke?” Bucky repeats, in complete disbelief. “They’re firing a _nuke_ at _Manhattan?”_

“Have they lost their damn minds?” Steve demands, but then he looks at Bucky through the window, and the two of them have the same thought at the same time. If the brass think they're losing... Well, they’re both military, or were; it wouldn’t be the first time either of them heard the phrase _acceptable losses._

“Probably,” Stark agrees. “Fortunately, I know just where to put it.”

 

“My God,” Steve says, because once again, he’s seen what’s about to happen before anybody else. He’s out of the bank now, standing beside Bucky and staring up at the streak of light zipping up beside the glowing blue beam that seems to be keeping the portal open.

Bucky can’t even speak. He can’t believe what’s happening. Stark just said… no, he’s got some kind of backup plan. This is not the way guys like Tony Stark operate. They always have a way out.

He said the nuke would blow in less than a minute.

That means he’s taking it through the portal with about fifteen seconds to go.

Bucky’s own words from earlier come back to him: _You wouldn’t know real sacrifice if it walked up and bit you in the ass._ Stark is doing it now, though. He’s making the sacrifice play, he’s falling on the grenade, he’s taking the hit to save his team and his city. “He’s not military,” he hears himself say to Steve. “He… he hasn’t trained for this, he isn’t supposed to do this, guys like us enlist so guys like him don’t _have_ to do this.”

“I know,” Steve says, and Bucky feels Steve’s hand, with its slender artist’s fingers, close around his under the strap of the shield. Then he says, “Natasha, close it.”

“Wait,” Bucky says, but he knows that this time, she won’t. They _are_ soldiers, all of them, and Natasha knows how to be ruthless, in a way more ruthless than a sniper has to be. Kill one man, save a city—it’s a regret, but it’s absolutely not a choice, not for a single heartbeat.

The beam of blue light flickers. The portal starts to shut.

And a body falls.

 

“Holy shit,” Bucky breathes, and Thor, who’s somehow come up beside him in all this confusion, sees the same thing he does: “He’s not slowing down.” He starts to whirl the hammer, getting ready to fly—and wow, it’s been a hell of a couple of days when _that_ seems perfectly normal—but Banner, or Hulk, is there first, making the catch and skidding down into the mess of concrete dust.

Bucky runs forward and crashes to his knees beside Stark, and Thor pulls off the faceplate of his helmet, but Bucky knows—before Steve elbows him out of the way and reaches under the metal to check for a pulse—that Stark isn’t breathing. The blue light on his chest, the thing that he said was keeping the shards of shrapnel from slicing into his heart—the blue light is out.

“Stark,” Steve says, “Stark,” and then, _“Tony,”_ as if that’s going to make any difference at this point.

Bucky Barnes is not a mechanical genius. He knows nothing about engineering, and only enough about biology to make it stop working with extreme prejudice when he has to. But there’s one basic fact that every guy should know: if something isn’t working, the first thing you do is bang on it.

He brings his metal hand down and bashes Stark on the chest.

There’s a buzz of energy, and Stark yelps and opens his eyes, staring up into his face. “What just happened?” he demands, as the blue ring flares to life, and then, “Barnes, you better not have kissed me.”

Relief hits Bucky so hard that he sits back on his heels and cracks up. Everybody stares at him, and he hardly even hears Steve tell Stark that they’ve won.

 

When Loki is secured—Bucky doesn’t ask where or how, but Thor is confident that the guy can’t escape before they can reconfigure the Tesseract to take him home—Stark starts fussing about shawarma again and Thor allows as how he could eat a few sandwiches or possibly a horse, and somehow or other, Bucky finds himself in one of Stark’s… okay, fine, he’ll give this a shot: _Tony’s_ chauffeured cars, along with everybody except Stark, Bruce, and Steve. He finds out later that Tony wanted to badger the crap out of Steve about all things serum, Vita-Ray, and Tesseract, absolutely none of which Steve was able to answer to his satisfaction, and that he wanted Bruce to hear all of it, not that it could possibly be a sore subject or anything. It does, however, explain how flatly exhausted both Steve and Banner look before they even walk into the shawarma joint.

The front of the restaurant has been hastily boarded up with plywood, but the owner is keeping it open in spite of everything, which makes Bucky smile: that’s the spirit of New York, right there. It pays off for her when Tony hands her a black AmEx and tells her to bring seven of everything on the menu, and take out enough of a tip to cover a new front window. Bucky bites back a snarky comment about how it must be nice to have that kind of money. The guy just died for a minute, he reminds himself. He’s not going to walk away from that unscathed, either. And if he’s still a rich asshole, at least he’s supporting a small business.

Most of the focus is on Steve while the food is being prepared, and the others make him tell what Tony refers to as “the defrosting story” twice before everyone is satisfied. At some point, Tony decides it’s hilarious to start calling him Capsicle Stick, which Steve, to Tony’s surprise and Bucky's glee, replies to with a question about rebuilding Snark Tower. Clint high-fives him for that one.

Bucky manages his share of obligatory wisecracks, too, but by the time the third batch of shawarma hits the table, he’s feeling more than a little ragged around the edges. The busted ribs are starting to be something he can’t ignore anymore, and that’s not even mentioning that this whole business with the aliens is coming on the heels of a depressive episode where he let his body, his meds, and his sleep patterns go to hell for a couple of weeks. When he realizes he’s so tired that he feels drunk, but without any of the good parts, he gets up and makes like he’s heading to the soda machine for a refill but instead slips out of the restaurant, out into the cool evening air of Manhattan.

People are out, on the streets, and a lot of them are already wearing homegrown expressions of support: Iron Man shirts have been a thing for a couple of years now, and a lot of people have flags, but there are homemade accessories popping up, too, a lot of them featuring the stylized A that seems to be representing the Avengers. A trio of teenaged girls walk past him, giggling at each other in spite of the devastation, and Bucky smiles. The city is a mess, but it’ll recover. New York knows how to beat the odds on this kind of thing.

Tony’s driver stops him as he’s about to walk away. “I’m Happy Hogan, Mr. Barnes,” he introduces himself. “Mr. Stark left me with orders to give a ride to anyone who needs one. Is there somewhere I can take you?”

“Quincy Street in Bed-Stuy?” Bucky asks, too tired to turn down the kindness, and Happy—shit, Bucky is never letting anyone make fun of _his_ name again—opens the door for him. The next thing he knows, he’s opening his eyes, which he only meant to shut for a minute, and he’s back in Brooklyn, in front of Clint’s building. Home.

He’d forgotten until now that he left his apartment in a pretty disgusting state, but when he opens the door, he gets a pleasant surprise for once. The place is sparkling clean. A note on the counter explains it: _B – you owe me $300 for the maid service, $250 for Lucky’s emergency vet bill and $79 for the running shoes he ate. Also, don’t ever do this to me again. – SW_ 

God bless Sam Wilson. Bucky texts him in reply:

 **what did I do to deserve you sam**  
**also I’m home**  
**sam I was fighting aliens in manhattan today**  
**sam how do I life**  
**what do you do for broken ribs**  
**I think I need to sleep for about 97 hours**

Given the situation, Sam’s responses are fairly measured.

 **Goddammit Barnes what the fucking hell I had to see you on the NEWS I s2g you shaved 30 years off my life wtf WTF**  
**Have you been secretly working for Shield all this time???**  
**How could you not tell me you’re a FUCKING AVENGER???**  
**Look, B, I’m glad you’re safe. I can’t believe I’m saying this but call me when you wake up and I’ll tape your ribs for you.**  
**Also, was that Steve I saw on the TV with you? If so, this better be a really, REALLY good story.**

Bucky doesn’t see the last one. It's already taking all the energy he has left to wriggle out of the tac gear and boots, and after that, he barely makes it to the couch before he’s fast asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Posted while sleepy. Sorry for any typos that resulted. :)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some discussion of depression / suicidal thoughts, I don’t think triggery but I prefer to overwarn.

Sam bangs on Bucky’s apartment door at seven-thirty in the morning, which would probably count as a war crime if he didn’t have coffee and bagels. “I brought breakfast,” he says, holding up the bag, when Bucky opens the door and squints at him. “If, you know, you superheroes eat that kind of thing.”

“Ohgod _coffee,”_ Bucky moans, making grabby hands for the cup, and Sam slides past him while he’s blissing out over the first gulp. He drops the bagels on the table and picks up his phone. “Becca? Yeah, I’m with your brother. He’s fine. …No, he’s having a religious experience with a caramel macchiato. …Really? Okay, hang on. Buck, she wants a picture to prove you’re not dead.”

Bucky lowers the cup and raises his metal middle finger. “Hey,” Sam says, “be nice. She’s been losing her mind since she couldn’t get you on the phone after the _alien invasion_ yesterday.”

“Huh? Oh. _Oh._ Shit.” Bucky converts the gesture to a peace sign and manages a strained smile, and Sam snaps the picture and hits _send._

“You believe me now, Bec? …Sure, I’ll tell him. Take care.” Sam hangs up, looks at Bucky solemnly, and reports, “She says you’re a dick.”

“I know.” Bucky collapses on the sofa. “Does she know about the, uh, Avenger thing?”

“No, and I’m not gonna be the one who tells her. How are you feeling?”

“Guh.”

“Why don’t you go shower while I put some more coffee on, and then we’ll see what we’re dealing with.”

“Nnngh.”

Bucky’s right side is pretty much one big bruise, and the hot water makes him keenly aware of a hundred little cuts and scrapes he didn’t know he had. He has to use his left arm to work the shampoo through his hair because he can’t lift the right one over his head. He goes back to the living room shirtless and dripping, and while Sam applies ice packs and KT tape to his injuries, he distracts himself with his phone. Besides the eleven missed calls from Becca—shit, he really is a terrible brother—and a handful of texts from friends checking in and asking him to do the same, he’s got a voicemail from a woman who identifies herself as Pepper Potts of Stark Industries, giving him a lot of complicated advice that mostly boils down to “Call me before you talk to the press or sign anything,” and one from Clint, asking him where he disappeared to. That one seems easy to deal with, so he dials Clint’s number. “Hey, Hawk Guy,” he says, when Clint answers.

“Bucky!” Clint’s tone is a complicated mix of relief, triumph, chagrin, and exhaustion. “How come you bailed last night?”

“Ask my busted ribs,” he says, and Clint gives a little laugh.

“Tell me about it. I’ve been with S.H.I.E.L.D. a while now and I mostly hold my own, but yesterday? That was unreal. Guys got, what, armor, magic, super strength—at least you’ve got a bionic arm, but I’m still fighting with a stick and a string from the Paleolithic era.”

“Paleolithic? Really?”

“I looked it up.”

“Are you okay, Clint?”

The sudden silence on the line is all the answer he needs. “Hey,” Bucky says, “it’s a process, right? You know you can talk to me any time. Or Sam. Or he’ll set you up with one of his buddies at the VA.”

“I know. Bucky, did I ever tell you about Laura?”

“Laura… Laura your ex? Laura, the one that got away because you were an idiot and thought you didn’t want a commitment but really you were just afraid you couldn’t get your shit together enough to take care of her and her kids?”

“Did I say that?”

“Tequila was involved.”

“Okay, now it sounds like me. Laura also works for S.H.I.E.L.D. She transferred to Iowa a couple years ago. I… called her. We talked. I think I’ll take a few days, go out there and talk some more.”

Iowa? What the hell kinds of threats is S.H.I.E.L.D. facing down in Iowa, alien cows? “So you’re finally gonna do what you would’ve done years ago if you weren’t a complete dumbass?”

“That’s what I love about you, Barnes. You’re so uplifting and supportive. How are you doing?”

“Uh, I’ll probably have a nervous breakdown later, but I just took a shit-ton of Vicodin I had left from the accident, so…”

“Welcome to the League of Damaged Superheroes,” Clint says dryly. “I’ll send you a membership card. Hey, will we see you at Thor’s big sendoff this afternoon? Should be a good time. Steve’ll be there.”

Goddammit, until now Bucky was doing such a good job of not thinking about that. “I gotta go,” he says, “I’ll pet Lucky for you,” and disconnects before Clint can ask any more awkward questions.

“Wow, you are clearly avoiding something in a huge way right now,” Sam says.

“There’s no problem too big to run away from,” Bucky mumbles. “It’s really complicated, Sam.”

Sam shoots him a skeptical look. “Take me through it, then. We’ll sort it out.”

He does. When he’s done, Sam sits very still and says, “…That’s really complicated.”

“Told you.”

“Captain America.”

“Yeah.”

_“Damn.”_

Bucky nods. As usual, Sam has summed up the situation perfectly.

“Okay, let’s do this. Take Steve out of the equation for a minute. What do you want to do next? You gonna join the Avengers? Fight crime in tights and a mask?”

Bucky laughs, which is stupid, because it hurts. “Fuck, no. I just want to go back to my dumb, boring life.”

“That… may not be an option. Take a look at this.” Sam pulls a copy of the _Times_ out of his bag and holds it out.

“What?” Bucky grabs the paper and stares at it. **ALIENS IN NEW YORK,** the headline reads, with a photo—not him, thank God, but the Hulk bashing one of the space whales, because of course. He scans the sub-headlines: **Buildings Destroyed, Hundreds Feared Dead; Washington Vows Justice Will Be Served; How Much Did S.H.I.E.L.D. Know?** , and finally, the one Sam meant for him to see: **Who Are the Avengers?** “Oh, no,” he groans. “Do they know who I am?”

“Not yet, but they’ll figure it out. There are only so many guys out there with a metal arm.” Sam pats him on the shoulder. “If I were you, I’d get some rest while I can, and then I’d call this Pepper Potts and throw myself on her mercy.”

“You know, a nap does sound really good right now.”

“You just drank four cups of coffee.”

“Do you have a point?”

Sam shakes his head. “I should get down to the center, anyway. Yesterday is going to bring up a lot of bad memories for a lot of people.” He tosses a blanket over Bucky and heads toward the door. “Hey,” he says, turning back. “One thing.”

“Yeah?”

“What is it that draws you to Steve so much?”

Bucky recognizes this trick, which Sam has used on him before; he wants him to answer from his gut, without thinking too much about it. So he gives it a shot. “I think…” he begins. “I used to be a sniper, you know? I lived in this kind of moral gray area. Let other people tell me who deserved to live or die. I guess the weirdest thing about it now is that it didn’t seem weird then. It seemed simple. Following orders, having a mission. Even after the caves, and the torture, and my arm—maybe it was more important after that not to ask too many questions. Then, after they kicked me out, I had to figure it out on my own. But Steve… Steve’s a compass. Or maybe an anchor. I mean, I could make wisecracks all day about him being a little guy who’s too dumb to run away from a fight. But he’s like that because he stands for something. He’s sure. And he makes me sure.”

“Well, a guy like that is probably worth putting up a fight for,” Sam says. “And not only against aliens. I’m just sayin’.”

After the door closes behind Sam, Bucky spends most of the morning dozing, occasionally waking up long enough to punch a few buttons on his phone screen and let someone know he isn’t dead. When he can’t sleep anymore, he watches the news long enough to see Pepper Potts, who turns out to be Stark’s right-hand woman, giving a press conference and praising the quick action of the Avengers while steadfastly refusing to identify any of them except Stark and Thor, who’s apparently already the subject of a “what the shit is Asgard and why did a guy from there attack us” press release by S.H.I.E.L.D. He turns it off when the conspiracy nuts come on and is scrounging in the kitchen for something he can eat that won’t take a lot of work—he’s going to be off takeout for a while, he thinks—when there’s a knock at the door.

He opens it to find Steve on his doorstep.

Steve cleans up nice. And by nice, Bucky means he looks like a total dork, wearing a button-down shirt and khakis and with his hair carefully parted to one side. If he focuses on how badly the guy needs a wardrobe update, maybe he won’t say anything stupid. “Steve,” he says.

“Bucky.”

They stand there like that for a minute and this time it’s Bucky who moves, more or less melting into Steve’s arms. It’s a little tricky to manage with the height difference, but anything’s possible with enough determination. “Oh,” Steve says, surprised, “okay,” and then, “I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me. You took off pretty quick last night.”

“You took off pretty quick after you kissed me.”

“Because I was terrified, you jerk. Can I come in, or do we have to do this in the hallway?”

“Hallway. Definitely hallway. I want Simone next door to hear everything,” is as far as Bucky gets, before Steve drags him inside, leads him to the couch, and sits him down so he can make a production of examining Sam’s handiwork.

“This looks awful. Only hurts when you breathe, right?”

“Pretty much. Did you, uh, find that out in your Hydra-fighting days?”

Steve looks startled, then shakes his head. “I had whooping cough when I was eleven. Coughed so hard I broke two ribs. Here, you can’t be warm enough like that.” He settles the blanket around Bucky’s shoulders, and is adding, “Do you want anything? I could make some tea, why don’t I make you some tea,” when Bucky catches his hand and holds it.

“I want you to talk to me, Steve. I want to know where your head’s at. Especially after yesterday. I want to know… where we stand. What you want.”

It takes Steve a long time to look him in the eye again. “Okay, don’t laugh, but the thing is, it was a first for me,” he says.

“What?” Bucky says. “First… as in first kiss? Oh, God, first kiss since 1945 or _first_ first kiss?”

“I mean first with a guy.” He lets that sink in before continuing, “Remember, I grew up Irish Catholic in the 1930s. It wasn’t something I thought I could get away with. I mean, there were ways, I could’ve gone and cruised the Navy Yard or something, but aside from the fact that everyone I knew thought it was a sin, there were laws back then. It would’ve killed my mother if I’d gotten caught, and going to jail would’ve killed me. And once the war was on, I was having a hard enough time trying to enlist without another strike against me. Then, right before I got the serum, I met this amazing woman, Peggy, and… I know I said I was gay, and I am, but I loved her, Bucky. I really did. She was in a class by herself. Don’t laugh, but for a while I thought that meant I was cured.”

Steve is watching Bucky’s face warily, as if he really has something to fear, and Bucky sighs. “You’re not the first guy I’ve met who was a four or five on the Kinsey scale and still claiming he was straight, Steve. You can stop looking at me like I’m going to tell you you’re not gay enough or something.”

“That’s not the worst part,” Steve says, looking down. “The worst part is, I _still_ love Peggy. I thought she was it for me, and I never really got to mourn after I lost her. I never thought I could feel this way about two people at the same time. But then I met you and… being with you was the first thing since the ice that felt anything like coming home.”

“And that scared the crap out of you,” Bucky says, trying and failing not to smile. “Scares me a little bit, too.” This is going to kill him, but he asks, “Do you need some time to figure out what you want?”

“Pretty sure what I want is to kiss you again.”

“Well, if you’re gonna twist my arm,” Bucky says, hoping his relief isn’t too obvious. “But, and I can’t _believe_ I’m saying this, but could we keep it sort of low-key tonight? Because, injuries.”

“How far did you think you were getting on our first date?” Steve asks sharply.

“Uh, _second_ date, punk. I bought you food in the hospital, so that would still count even if I hadn’t let you get to first base.”

“So by your logic, we’re all dating Stark, then.”

“Oh, God, I hope not,” Bucky says fervently.

“Tony’s not a bad guy, Buck. He just doesn’t live in the same world as us. In the last forty-eight hours he lost a friend and almost died himself. The next few months are going to be tough on him.”

“Yeah, they will. He’s gonna have nightmares and panic attacks and drink way too much and his girlfriend’s gonna leave him because he won’t just fucking talk to her and it’s gonna take him way too long to suck it up and admit that he needs help. Ask me how I know, Steve. Go on, ask.”

“I don’t have to. You’re not the only soldier in the room. You know, if you were to join the Avengers, you might be able to talk him down off a few of those ledges.”

“Right, like they’d have me.”

“Are you kidding? After you left, Tony spent an hour making metal arm jokes. I’m sure getting you on his team would be a dream come true for the puns alone.”

“Steve, would you shut up about Stark and get over here already?”

Steve moves closer, and Bucky puts his left arm around him and pulls the blanket around them both before he leans in for the second kiss. It’s not the same—it’s less sudden, less intense, Steve too tentative to be lost in the moment and Bucky too sore and exhausted. Not to mention the sudden, completely inappropriate urge to giggle that comes over him when he realizes he’s got his tongue in Captain America’s mouth and sweet fucking mercy, what would Mrs. Strothers, who made him do a book report on the Howling Commandos in fifth-grade Social Studies, have to say about _that._ Then Steve’s hand slides down his spine to the small of his back and oh, yeah, that’s pretty okay. He reciprocates by tracing his mouth down Steve’s throat, to the hollow where his neck meets his shoulder, which makes Steve make a noise like “Huhhh” and say, “What happened to k… keeping things low-key?”

“Well,” Bucky says, and now he’s worked his way to the point where, if he wants to keep going, Steve’s stupid shirt has gotta go, “I remembered one of the good things about having a metal arm is that it can’t get tired. And as long as Stark went to all the trouble to make me a new one, it seems like it would only be fair if I gave it a nice, thorough field test. For science.”

“Oh,” Steve says, and it’s convenient how his shirt comes off just in time for Bucky to see how far down he turns red when he blushes. It’s pretty far. He likes it.

For all its strength, the metal arm really is capable of some surprisingly delicate actions. Had to be, to get that perfect between-heartbeats twitch on the trigger. Not to mention that the wrist has just a little more range of motion than ordinary human muscles and tendons. “You can say no if this isn’t okay,” Bucky says, still close enough that his mouth brushes Steve’s skin, while he slides the— _his_ —hand down and hooks a finger under Steve’s waistband. “I’ll stop if it freaks you out. I know it takes some getting used to. Or we can try something else, or not do anything tonight if—”

“Bucky,” Steve says, with his mouth very close to Bucky’s ear, “oh, God, Bucky, _Bucky, please,”_ and Bucky takes that as an unqualified _yes._

 

In the morning, when Steve wanders out to the living room, wearing only his boxer-briefs (very modern of him and also a lot of fun to take off him; Bucky approves) and one of Bucky’s T-shirts, Bucky has a coffee cup beside him and a file box’s worth of papers spread out in front of him. “Maria Hill sent over your old S.S.R. files from when you got the serum,” he says, without looking up. “And you were trying to join the army? Steve, I can’t believe you were even leaving the house.”

“What?”

“Do you realize if I put all your health problems in alphabetical order, there are three things on the list before I finish the letter A? The good news is, they can do a lot more for asthma these days. I talked to Becca, and she says you need an inhaled corticosteroid and a home nebulizer. Oh, and I have a confession to make. She wanted to know why I was asking all these questions and I told her it was for a guy I was dating and now she wants to meet you, which—are we dating? I mean, I want us to be dating, but I should’ve asked you first.”

Steve sits down on the couch with his head tipped to the side in confusion. “Leaving aside the thing with your sister—which, yeah, I think we’re dating but you really need to give me some time to get _used_ to this, Bucky—how do you figure I’m getting the money for new prescriptions? And don’t say you’ll float me a loan. I’m not a charity case.”

“Funny you should mention that. See, when Hill sent the files over, she also asked me to pass on a message to you. I guess S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t have a chance to tell you this before you pulled your disappearing act, but, punk, it turns out you’re _loaded._ You were never declared dead, which she thinks means you’re entitled to back pay for all that time you spent in the ice. Somebody in the Army is going to be real sorry they didn’t finish their paperwork seventy years ago. It might take a few months to get the ball rolling, though, and we’ve gotta get you out of that rat-trap apartment faster than that. I was in there for like five seconds and I’m pretty sure I saw some black mold on the ceiling.”

“My place isn’t that bad,” Steve says. “I grew up in a rear tenement. My mother used to put a board across the bathtub and use it as our kitchen table. _That_ was a bad apartment. And I won’t get any money from the government, not after I walked out on them and told them all to go to hell a couple weeks after they revived me.”

“I don't think that's a legally binding statement. Anyway, Clint said he’d give you an Avengers discount if you wanted to live here, but Tony is already cooking up some scheme to move us all into Stark Tower. Wants to rename it Avengers Tower and have everybody there in case there’s another disaster. Clint’ll never go for it, and I can’t really see myself there either, but Bruce and Natasha already said yes. Bruce figures Tony can come up with a way to lock him down if he goes, you know, green, and I guess S.H.I.E.L.D. is putting Natasha on loan to the Avengers. It’s all pretty up in the air right now, but they definitely want you on the team. You’d be like Mission Control, I guess. It’s something to think about.”

“Bucky, can I ask you something?” Steve says.

“Sure.”

“How much coffee have you had today?”

“Um.” Bucky glances at the empty coffee pot. “All of it?”

“You have a problem, Barnes.”

“Hey, if you’re allowed to have a complete lack of any self-preservation instinct whatsoever, I’m allowed a caffeine habit. Do you like waffles? There’s a waffle place around the corner. I think we should go get some waffles. I’m starving.”

“Bucky,” Steve says, suddenly very serious, “is there something else going on here? Because I want you to know I’m saying this from a place of love, but you sound like Tony Stark right now.”

Bucky freezes. Then he slumps. “Fuck,” he says. “For a minute, I thought I was actually going to be the cool one in this relationship.”

“You are the cool one. I don’t understand half of what people are talking about these days, and you’re a gorgeous long-haired badass with a motorcycle. What’s going on?”

Steve sits across from him at the table, and Bucky, resisting the urge to preen over the “gorgeous” part, reaches out and takes Steve’s slim hands in his mismatched ones. “When I was in the hospital,” he says. “When I crashed my bike.”

“I remember.”

“Sam asked me if it was a suicide attempt.”

Steve sucks in a breath through his teeth.

“It wasn’t,” Bucky says quickly. “I swear it wasn’t, Steve. I didn’t want to die and I definitely wasn’t going to off myself. But—I get why Sam thought that, because I hadn’t been doing that great lately. It’s a bad feeling, not having a sense of purpose, you know?”

“Given that I thought I was dying for my country in 1945, and then I woke up in a body that was pretty much useless? I think maybe I do.”

“Well, then, maybe you’ll understand when I say that just for a second, when I lost control of the bike, I was thinking, This might not be the worst thing that could happen. Boom, it’s over, and then no more nightmares, no more panic attacks, no taking a bunch of pills every day just to be able to go out in the world and act like a normal person. ‘Course, when the impact happened, it wasn’t quick and it sure as hell wasn’t painless. They told me later that if I hadn’t put my arm up to protect myself, I probably would’ve died instead of just bashing myself up and denting a couple of metal plates. I don’t remember doing that. I guess my body wanted to live even when I thought I didn’t. But I still didn’t know what the point was. And then, when I met you… I’m not saying that you came along and magically fixed all my problems. That’s not your job, although knowing you, you’ll probably try—”

“—Says the guy who spent the morning rearranging my life,” Steve says, with another of those wry smiles.

“—But the thing you did do is, you saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself.”

“I wasn’t the only one. Clint and Sam think you’re pretty special, and so does your sister.”

“Yeah, and I don’t know why, after the crap I’ve made all of them put up with. But it was different with you. Fury sent me to find you because our team needed a catalyst, something to change it from a bunch of small things into one big thing. You didn’t just do it for the Avengers, though. You changed me too. I know this isn’t some romantic comedy, and my life isn’t gonna suddenly be perfect just because I got a boyfriend. I’m still gonna wake up screaming once or twice a month, and have panic attacks over the most random shit, and there’ll be times when I’m too fucked up to do anything but lie in bed for a week. And even without all of that, I’d still be a guy who cuts people off in traffic and forgets to call his sister during alien invasions and leaves hair in the shower drain. But… even if I knew you were gonna walk out of here tonight and I’d never see you again, I’d still want to be a better person because you thought I could, Steve. And that’s kind of great and it kind of scares the fuck out of me and it kind of makes me want to hold onto you way too tight and never let go. Which is why I’m trying so hard to slow down and play it cool here, even though honestly, I just want to jump you every time I look at you.”

“That would be horrible,” Steve says dryly. “And for the record, Bucky, I’m not that great myself. People have built up what I did as if it was so brave, but it wasn’t like signing up for Project Rebirth was a hard choice. I never figured I was long for this world. It’s easier to jump on a grenade when you’re twenty-four if you’re already sure you’re going to die of the flu before you’re thirty. At least one of those ways, your death means something. And you’ve seen that I’ve got enough of a temper to pick fights with half of Brooklyn, and—”

“You jumped on a grenade?” says Bucky.

“It was a dummy grenade. It was kind of a test.”

“You _jumped_ on a _grenade,”_ Bucky repeats. “You complete and utter _dumbass.”_

“Okay, fine, but the point I’m trying to make is—”

“When I said no self-preservation instinct whatsoever, I didn’t know the half of it, did I? Punk, I swear to God, if you ever do anything like that again I’m putting a backpack leash on you so I can—”

Steve leans over and kisses him on the mouth, hard. Bucky blinks. “What was that?”

“I’m distracting you,” Steve says calmly. “Now, can we please stop trying to out-stupid each other and go back to bed?”

There’s briefly a question about whether they’re going to make it _to_ the bed, but in the end, Bucky’s ribs just aren’t up for the kind of punishment they’d have to endure on the hallway floor, so they have to put things on pause for a minute. It's a brief pause, though, and they never do manage to go out for waffles.

 

“So Clint is in Iowa, getting back together with an old girlfriend,” Sam says, “and you’ve been in your apartment banging Captain America, and meanwhile all I get is asked to watch Clint’s dog? You owe me, Barnes. You owe me big time. You owe me something on a get-me-a-date-with-the-hottest-Avenger level.”

“That’s a good idea,” Steve says, without looking up from his sketchpad. Bucky’s a little leery of what he’s going to see when Steve finally decides to share with the rest of the class; earlier today, he caught Steve looking at him with pencils and paper in hand and made a _draw me like one of your French girls_ crack that he immediately regretted—first because he had to explain it, and then because of the wicked little smirks Steve has been giving him ever since. “Sam and Thor would be great together.”

 _“Hey,”_ Bucky says.

“Calm down. And Sam, I know you’re kidding, but that’s actually not a bad idea. I’ll ask Natasha if she’s interested.” Steve finally gets up from the couch and brings the sketch over to the table. “Okay, this is pretty rough, but tell me what you think.”

Bucky looks at the drawing Steve has set in front of him, trying to decide if it’s supposed to be a joke. It’s him, in an outfit he recognizes as loosely based on the old Captain America suit circa World War II, only this one is shaded dark blue with only occasional splashes of red and white, and a white star on the chest. His left arm is concealed behind the vibranium shield, and his face is partly covered by the high-tech goggles, but it’s definitely him. It doesn’t escape him that Steve has drawn him smiling.

“You… you want me to be Captain America?” he says.

“Well, we do have the shield,” Steve says. “It’s even more of a symbol than I was. Someone should carry it, and there’s no one I’d rather hand it off to than you. Besides, Stark’s team is short on muscle since Thor doesn’t seem likely to come back any time soon—”

“I wouldn’t call _any_ team with Banner on it short of muscle, Steve.”

“Yeah, but you don’t want to bring the Hulk out for every little thing. Anyway, you’ve got close combat skills, marksmanship, tactical knowledge, and you’ve already proven you’re good under pressure and can work well with this team. Besides,” Steve meets his eyes, “you care about helping people and doing the right thing. That goes a long way with your team captain.”

“Does it,” Bucky says, grinning. “How far exactly?”

“Please let me get out of here before you start giving examples,” says Sam.

“You know,” Bucky says, “Sam, here, is the one you should be asking, not me. I was just a sniper. He was pararescue. Those guys are crazy enough to jump out of perfectly good airplanes.”

“Really,” Steve says. “You know how to fly a plane? We could use you, Sam.”

“We’ll talk,” Sam says. “Because I’m not sorry I got out, but if Captain America needs my help, I can’t think of a better reason to get back in.” He looks at Bucky meaningfully.

Bucky hesitates, with his metal hand hovering over Steve’s drawing. Bucky Barnes, accidental temporary Avenger, was one thing. But Bucky Barnes, Captain America? It’s such a huge thing—an honor and a responsibility. And the fact that the previous Captain America is asking him is intimidating enough, but the fact that Steve is asking him, _trusting_ him, that’s something else entirely.

It’s a chance to be more than what he is now, and Steve will be behind him all the way. Pushing him. Challenging him. Asking him to give more than he’s ever given before. Turning him into part of something bigger than himself.

He swallows hard, and asks, “When do we start?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear Reader! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this fic anywhere near as much as I enjoyed writing it. 
> 
> The adventures of Tiny Steve-n-Avenger Bucky continue in [Synthesis](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6127366/chapters/14042569).
> 
> Thank you for reading!
> 
> [The Tumblr post for this fic is [here](http://follow-the-sun-fanfic.tumblr.com/post/146676156785/catalysis-followthesun-multifandom-archive).]


End file.
